Evaluating Printing and Copying Needs

[annav]

I work in the IT department of an organization with about 300 employees in two locations. Network printers and photocopiers have been purchased or leased and are scattered randomly around. We've been commanded to do a proper evaluation of the current printer and copier utilisation, overhead expenses and determine what can be done to optimize printer usage and lower costs. Can anybody recommend a book / site / resource that can give some guidance on this?<br>
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Many thanks

 

[MasterRacker]

I don't know that there are any hard numbers as to what is the &quot;right&quot; amount of paper to be generated by any given organization. <br>
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I take page counts off all our printers monthly and plug them into a spread sheet along with the date. The sheet divides number of pages since the last reading by the number of days then multiplies by 1.4. (The 1.4 is 365/255 - Essentially I am eliminating weekends and calculating pages per working day per printer.)<br>
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This will at least give you a measure of where the heaviest usage is. You can look in the manuals and compare usages against the duty cycles of your printers to ensure you're not overloading them and you can also possibly rearrange the printers to give the fastest ones to the groups with the heaviest usage. <br>
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In our organization, the printer usages range from 10 to 450 pages per working day.<br>
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Other factors can affect your distribution, such as the need for a confidential printer that is in a restricted area. One like that could have a very low count, but for other reasons, cannot be merged with another one. Another reason for one with a low count may be a remote office that needs its own printer because the walking distance is too far.<br>
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If you total your printer usage you can also measure other parts of your IS system. For example, our company has grown about 20% over the last 2 years, and we have definitely added a number of printers accordingly. However, our overall monthly paper usage has remained basically constant over that period. This would indicate that online forms, ERP etc. are gradually making us more effiecient paper-wise since we are generating less paper per person. <p> Jeff<br><a href=mailto: masterracker@hotmail.com> masterracker@hotmail.com</a><br><a href= > </a><br>

 

[annav]

Thanks Jeff. Much appreciated. I searched Amazon and couldn't find a book on this topic. This surprised me, I figure somebody must have written on this. I will take your advice and perhaps check some other book sites as well. I'll post if I find anything.

 

[MasterRacker]

By simply analyizing usage like I said above you can optimize placement of the printers. To actually reduce paper usage, you have to look at what the documents actually are and what the document flow is. So really you are looking at the dreaded &quot;reengineering&quot; (re-engineering?) of your business processes. There's been plenty written about that the last 10 years. <p> Jeff<br><a href=mailto: masterracker@hotmail.com> masterracker@hotmail.com</a><br><a href= > </a><br>