Responsible Printing: Practices That Teach You To Save More Whilst Printing Less

How many times have you experienced printing at home only to find out later that there is something wrong with what you have printed? It is either the font size or a wrong word or even a wrong document that went into the printer. Well, that scenario depicts not just a waste of time. It can also mean more costs on your part in that you need another paper to reprint what you need and also printer ink to make the printing possible.

Imagine this same thing happening to an employee in the workplace. From that one employee, another would commit the same error in the future. When you sum up all the errors, you will find out that the business enterprise loses more than what you have lost at home. This can mean more expenses on the part of the business owner. What is needed then? A review of responsible printing practices will be of help.

Retrain your employees about the good and bad printing habits

A simple error in printing is just one of the problems that your employees may make that can cost you a lot of money. Apart from this practise, employees may also keep on printing documents that they do not actually need. You may have reminded them several times about eliminating this bad printing habit but still with just a press of the mouse button over the "File-Print-Ok" tabs on the document, unintentional printing can take place.

Statistics show that an average employee would usually spend as much as a thousand dollars in printing. If you have 12 employees in your small enterprise, that would mean $12,000 worth of costs on your part. Well, it is totally okay to spend cost on printing as long as the document is usable but the truth is there is around 20% of these printouts that have not been glanced upon and are thrown to waste.

Teach your employees the responsibility of asking themselves "Why should I print?"

Some employees feel the need to print simply because they want to be safe. They want a copy of that document for their safety and they feel they can only do that if they have the hardcopy on hand. Some would also need printed documents for a report even when the soft-copy is available in the hard drive. They simply want something they could look at during the presentation. Others would also use colour printing at some point. This one even costs more. If you want to save on printing costs, responsible printing dictates that your employees should know why they need to print.

Use duplex printing

If the document should be printed but you still want to make sure you save on cost, then you can consider using duplex or double-sided printing provided you have multifunction devices that help with that. This will significantly reduce your supply cost since you need not use one paper for each page.

Use the print draft feature

Many printers, if not all, already have that built-in future. Printing in draft is faster and saves much on print cartridge or printer ink costs. Employees can simply send multiple copies of the print job into the device and from there, they can choose whether to continue the printing or not. In this case, continuing the print job will only be necessary if they are satisfied with the printed draft and cancel it if they find errors in the first printout.

Teach them to proofread

This can virtually take some time but would help assure that employees only print the document exactly as they want it to be – with no grammar and spelling errors on them. Proofreading the document will help them check if they have forgotten something that is essential to the printout. Using the print preview feature is also crucial in proofreading since they can see that they used the proper alignment or margins in the document before they send it to a printer.

Keep the printed output simple

As mentioned awhile back, colour printing increases print costs. Most of the times, what you need is a text copy in which case monochrome printing will be sufficient enough. You would not want every employee committing the same mistake over and over again and prejudicing your printing costs. If you think that employees cannot follow simple instructions when it comes to printing, you can ask someone to set-up the network in such a way that only one device will be allowed to accept colour printing. This person can help you in such a way that he can place in the only authorised users who can print documents in colour.

Responsible printing is a simple thing. If you are serious about cutting your printing expenses, then it is high time to follow all the tips mentioned above. You can also use our managed print services to help you track which print outputs have been put to waste. From our detailed reports, you will see who amongst the network users needs to be reminded about cost savings.