School districts: Reducing print costs
We’re all on a journey to paperless, but until we get there how can you, as a District or School admin, help save money on print costs.
How can your district save money on printing?
For many School Districts printing is still very much part of the day-to-day document workflow.
Both teachers and students still find reasons to print every day.
We are all on a journey to paperless, but until we get there how can you, as a District or School admin help save money on print costs.
Understand where you’re spending
Without understanding exactly what you’re spending money how can you be expected to save?
Comprehensive print spend reports are a cornerstone of being able to reduce a District’s print costs. You will have a wide variety of printers deployed in your organization, each of those printers will have a different per-page cost associated with them.
Ensure that you understand which printers are costing the most to run. High volume printers should be run at minimum per-page costs, regardless of whether you’re on a managed print service contract or whether you own and operate the printers or copiers directly. directprint.io includes detailed reporting from the individual printer level right the way up to the whole organization. Admins get a detailed analysis of spend across the whole District.
Encourage mindful printing
How often do you find reams of unclaimed paper at the printers?
Encouraging mindful printing is key to reducing paper and toner waste in your organization. Mindful printing should be encouraged by both the end-users and print budget holders. directprint.io has tools to help raise awareness of print wastage in both end-users and print resource budget holders.
Reprint detection
For end-users/students/teachers, turn on reprint detection, as reprints cause a lot of print waste. By preemptively detecting a reprint of a document, directprint.io will encourage the end-user to reduce duplication and therefore reduce waste. Our industry-unique reprint detection also detects changed pages and will encourage the end-user to only reprint changes.
Budget alerts
For Print Budget Holders set up print budgeting within the directprint.io admin console. This will enable automatic alerts for print budget holders when print costs or print consumption exceeds warning or limit levels. This is a useful tool to control absolute spending and prompt better print behavior.
Implement automatic cost saving
Toner reduction
directprint.io offers automatic toner reduction modes (smart draft modes). The system will automatically detect whether this is the first time that you’re printing a document and decide to offer the end-user a draught mode instead of the best mode print quality. Choosing draft mode can dramatically reduce the amount of toner required for a print, especially if the document is image-heavy.
Page limits
This feature is especially useful in school environments with younger students. As an administrator you can place an upper limit on the number of pages printed in any 24-hour period, this prevents accidental or deliberate abuse of print resources.
Secure print / PIN release
People quickly forget they’ve printed. This is both a resource and a security risk. Enabling PIN release at printer will reduce the number of orphaned jobs left on the printer.
Conclusion
We believe that this comprehensive toolset from directprint.io provides administrators with a range of options to help control their print costs. Most of these features can be enabled independently allowing administrators to test which cost-saving strategies work best for their student and teacher populations.
If you are a School or District why don’t you schedule a demo of directprint.io. We think you can save money on print.