Tooling up

• Article 2 of 2
• Document output management, May 2005
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 56K

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Many of these free tools can also be integrated with more mainstream systems management tools, such as HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli or Computer Associates’ Unicenter. Together, they may be able to highlight printer capabilities that are not being used. Almost all workgroup printers now have duplex (double-sided) printing capabilities, for example, yet quite often they are turned off by default. Turning them on can, obviously, almost halve paper use.

For organisations that do not want to let users access certain facilities, such as colour printing, which is more expensive, customising printer drivers or the printer’s own software is an option. Often, considerable savings can be generated simply by ensuring that the correct drivers are available, that they are installed with the correct defaults or they do not provide the more expensive features the printers offer.

Glen Mason, a marketing manager at Canon UK recalls a situation at his own company: “One user printed 1,673 pages of colour in a month, at a cost of £152, purely because his driver was set to colour by default. The next month we saved £128 on that, by setting his driver to black and white.”

Canon offers Multifunctional Embedded Application Platform (MEAP) in its product range, a Java-based application platform that enables organisations to change the way their printers and copiers behave. By developing suitable applications, organisations can then restrict what printers will do for end users.

However, they need to avoid being too restrictive, since this approach can often backfire, says Goble. “Users tend to find a way. I’ve seen organisations say they’ll only provide mono to their employees – no colour. Then staff go down to PC World, buy inkjet printers at £100, the consumables as much again, and plug them into the backs of their desktops,” he says.

Because the amount is so small, the cost of the device is expensed through the stationery budget and the organisation does not know anything about it. “If 200-300 people do that, it becomes an issue,” adds Goble. “If these printers aren’t shared on the network, which many aren’t, they’re invisible to management tools and only a physical inspection of desktops – or the stationery budget – will reveal their presence.”

Counting the cost
The next step is accounting. Without knowing who is printing where, it is impossible for an organisation to know what its biggest costs are or even if any kind of formal print management policy or system is necessary. Systems such as Canon’s Uniflow and Macro 4’s Business Information Logistics range have accounting modules that help organisations to work out how much they are spending on printing.

“You install it on a print server or on its own and it monitors all the printing via the servers as well as locally. From that point, it generates a report which shows how much A3, A4 and other paper has been printed and at what price. It even records whether the document was stapled,” says Canon’s Mason.

Auditing software such as this is more useful once it has been in place for some time, since it can provide detail on whether print management policies are working. It can also see if certain printers are under- or over-utilised or if more powerful printers that could potentially replace several other printers would be more cost-effective. By reducing the number of printers in use, power consumption can be reduced and consumables, which can easily add up to several multiples of the hardware acquisition costs over the lifetime of the printer, can also be cut back.

By providing logins, using network addresses or other identifiers, it is possible to monitor which users or departments are using what printers. Probably more importantly, unless the organisation intends to impose quotas and strict enforcement rules on employees, is the ability to monitor the volumes and types of work passing through each printer and encourage users to use the right printer for the right of job.

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