Would you ever buy a car without checking its gas consumption? Would you live in a house without checking how much the hydro bills are each month? What about cellphone rates – would you sign up for a three-year plan without knowing how many minutes you get for your money?
If the answer to these questions was “no” then it begs the question: what else should we be tracking the efficiency of and, to put it in context of a business, where do companies lose large sums of money when they become remiss in tracking their expenses?
Toner consumption in offices is an underestimated expense. Toners are not a one-size-fits-all model, but many companies do not invest the time in finding an option that best suits their needs.
Toner efficiency is measured by a standard five per cent usage rate. Five per cent usage is roughly 2 paragraphs on an 8 ½ x 11 sheet in black text – not bolded.
This is not a reasonable estimation of printer use though and going by this statistic will prove to be a very costly mistake.
In order to establish a baseline for your office printing needs there are some parameters to establish:
- What types of documents does your office print? Be it PDFs, images, or documents it is important to know on average what you are printing and how often.
- How much above the average five per cent ink coverage per page are you? Is there a lot of toner on your pages? More than a paragraph or two? The actual average ink coverage for a page is 30 per cent – that is 12 paragraphs of text, or, six times the five per cent benchmark. Any color printing will require more toner.
- How many people need access to a printer and do they all have similar printing requirements?
Once your company’s printing usage has been established you can begin to track toner usage and cost. One way to monitor this expense is to run a Managed Print program that will make evaluations to see if this is an area where your company is able to streamline and become more efficient.
Managed Print programs will not only track printing costs but will allow you to implement printing rules. Printing rules are a set of conditions that allow only certain departments to print in color, recommendations on which machines to send bigger or smaller jobs to, or will make money-saving settings such as double-sided printing default for certain machines.
These are cost-cutting measures that will help your company become more efficient, more environmentally friendly, and help to save by cutting down on unnecessary printing material waste.
To find out how much your business is currently spending on print, click here for your free print assessment:
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