Print assessments provide business leaders with immediate insight into their organizations' actual printing behaviors, volumes and costs with nominal effort. Newer monitoring software technology makes the process very easy to monitor print devices and capture data over a predetermined period of time. The data collected is used to create a fact-based report of findings to evaluate the organization's current state and identify possible opportunities to reduce costs, boost employee productivity and reduce avoidable waste.
Print assessment reporting usually includes the following information:
- Inventory of all Print Devices - Networked and offline devices
- Usage by Device - Black and white, and color print volumes
- Actual Print Costs – By page, by device and overall
- User Activities - By department or end user level
- Energy Consumption – For all hard copy devices
- Recycling Practices – Used cartridge disposal
Upon review of the findings, business leaders are able to make educated decisions on short-term and long-term opportunities that may include benchmarking against similar organizations.
Here are three popular print assessment opportunities:
1. Online Free Print Savings Estimator: Simply enter the number of office employees you have to calculate how much money and how many trees you could save. This tool serves as a popular first step to identify an opportunity based on statistical data from hundreds of print assessments completed with clients from a wide cross section of industries. The results tend to be surprisingly accurate! Click here for your print savings estimate in seconds!
2. Complimentary Print Assessment: Customers looking to gain insight on their actual print volumes and costs benefit with access to advanced print monitoring software. This technology collects fact-based data on all networked devices in your specific print environment. Collecting data on non-networked print devices is usually completed by a brief onsite walk around to ensure the accuracy of the final report. Most organizations immediately spot an opportunity to reduce print-related expenses by up to 30% from this exercise alone.
3. Professional Services: For larger organizations that may have multiple locations or an international footprint, a more in-depth process is usually recommended to collect and curate the data on a larger scale. From our experience, the payoff is typically equal to the scope of study because larger organizations tend to suffer most from lack of cost visibility and expense control in the area of office printing. This is largely due to fragmented procurement or unintentional oversight.
In summary, print assessments may vary in size and scope depending on the complexity of an organization's print environment. Most organizations (big or small) suffer from an unmanaged print environment that causes inefficiency and avoidable waste. For this reason, most print assessments serve to provide the necessary information and validation of the need for Managed Print Services - an opportunity to engage a business partner to help you manage your printing while you manage your business.
