Print Audit is a company which sells software and services designed to assist companies to manage their printing. They work through print dealers primarily, and publish information which assists these dealers to support their customers. 
They recently published the results of data collected in doing print assessments in 21 enterprise level accounts. Some of what they learned from this data is interesting and can show many businesses where they may be wasting money through the use of print devices.
There are three key things which this material shows:
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Government employees print twice as much as the average business employee. Medical is second at almost the same level . Both average over 50 pages per day average per employee.
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Financial employees print 60% internet based documents. Over 4 times what is printed from Excel
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In each of the above categories there is very low duplex usage. For financial and government it is virtually zero and for medical about 14%.
Any business operator who has looked at how to reduce the cost of paper and print in their business knows that controlling single page printing (set devices to duplex automatically), managing web based printing (read the pages on line and only print if critical, use bookmarks to go back to pages rather than print), and encourage users to only print if absolutely necessary are all steps that any print management plan will use.
The Print Audit data confirms that this is not happening in many enterprise organizations.
Is it happening in yours. Read a summary of the Print Audit material and draw your own conclusions. The focus of this article is addressed to print dealers however the information has value to end users as well.
The data covered in this article relates to reviews of large networks with over 13000 users and almost 10000 workstations which means it may not directly apply to small business or those with smaller networks. It seems reasonable to expect however that for many mid sized organizations similar trends can occur. Once your print devices start to grow in number the way they are used starts to easily get out of control. The data shows that there are opportunities to change your users printing habits and thereby impact your overall operating costs.
Have you conducted a review of your print usage? Do you know what your employees are printing and where?
Lee K
Photo Credit: By Jonathan Joseph Bondhus (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
