<h2 style="text-align: left; line-height: 1.5;">Less is more… when print management becomes budget management</h2>
<strong>With the paperless office becoming more and more of a “thing”, businesses and public sector organisations are attempting to drive down print budgets more and more. In reality, print isn’t going to go away – hard copies still need to be kept for records and contracts, and sometimes it’s just easier to work from a print off as opposed to a computer screen.</strong>

With that in mind, the best way to keep customers engaged with print, and work to integrate it with a successful print and paperless policy is to advise them of the best possible solution.

Below are some interesting stats to illustrate why effective print management is important, and the best possible way to achieve this.

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<h3 style="text-align: left;">40% of people describe themselves as “paper people”</h3>
No policy will ever be effective if it doesn’t have the buy-in of the people it is created for. While loving paper is great, the need for organisations to control and minimise the amount that is printed off is huge… being able to encourage or enforce duplex printing helps greatly, as it means the “paper people” are using up to 50% less paper than they would be otherwise.

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<h3 style="text-align: left;">45% of paper printed ends up binned at the end of the day</h3>
If only “paper people” printed (which we know isn’t the case, but bear with us!), this could lead to 18% of paper printed a day to end up as waste. This is down to duplicate printing, people printing documents and forgetting they’ve been printed (so someone clears them off the printer tray at the end of the day).

Having a solution in place that requires the person printing to be present at a printer to print their document helps, as there is no print and forget scenario or wondering whether hitting the print button actually worked!

Being able to allocate specific quotas or budgets to departments helps tremendously with ensuring people only print what they need to, as it only takes one incident of someone not being able to print any more due to quota before they start considering what they print.

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<h3 style="text-align: left;">The average paper consumption grows by 22% per year</h3>
This means that without control, an organisation’s paper consumption could double in under 3 ½ years. Having access to detailed analytics, dashboards and reports mean that organisations can get a handle on this ongoing and ensure that their printing consumption is as low as possible year after year.

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<h3 style="text-align: left; line-height: 1.5;">The cost of printing on paper can be 13 - 31x the cost of the paper itself</h3>
Staggering, isn’t it? This takes into account depreciation and degradation on printing devices, toner and ink, costs of maintenance and management and capital outlay for other print consumables. As a result, every sheet of paper that is printed has much more of an impact than just the cost of the paper itself – a fact that most people don’t consider.

Being able to prompt users with a pop-up message to remind them of the impact of printing when they don’t need to print can be an extremely effective way to make people consider and take action as a result.

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Taking the above stats into account, and the average size of a Higher Education institution in the UK (14,000 students), this could lead to 25,200 sheets of paper being wasted per day, adding up to costs of <strong>£2,457</strong> of waste cost per day on printing, or a huge <strong>£368,550</strong> of waste cost per year.

Assuming the growth stated above, this means that in just over 3 years time this number will grow to a whopping <strong>£737,100</strong>.

Now… let’s put this into perspective if an effective print management solution was put in place and only a few simple steps were taken:
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 	<li>Paper usage could be reduced by up to 30% by enforcing duplex printing</li>
 	<li>Follow-me printing could be used to not allow print-and-forget scenarios, reducing this number again by an average of 30%</li>
 	<li>Other steps – including quotas and reminders – could be taken to reduce the number further by at least 50%</li>
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This would then turn the above numbers around… making the per-year waste cost only £90,295– representing a £278,255 saving on student printing alone. In 3 years this would represent a massive £556,510 saving. Bear in mind, this only takes into account “paper people” and not everyone else who prints… so the actual savings will be much higher!

When put like this, customers will suddenly stand up and listen to what you’re saying and be desperate to make the savings…

Fortunately, Papercut can provide all of these features and more – including secure print release, validated access for MFDs, allowing BYOD printing to name a few. When put in context, the price is insignificant in relation to the potential savings – this not only makes your sales process much easier but also significantly protects your margin on the basis of the money you’re saving the customer!

Try it for yourself - use Papercut’s online ROI calculator on behalf of your customers, available here: https://www.papercut.com/tools/roi/