Tonight’s dinner recipe; the manual for the digital camera you’ve just purchased; the boarding passes for next week’s holiday; if we’re honest, we’ve all printed something at work we shouldn’t have.

Similarly, how often have you colour-printed an email or web page that contains links? Did you ever stop to consider that the blue hyperlink text will result in a colour cost-per-page rather than black and white?

Employees have long been printing things they shouldn’t be, but how do you stop them?

Policing email printing

We’ll start with email, because the cost of printing messages from your inbox can quickly spiral. In our example above, the cost-per-page for a colour print job might be as much as ten times that of a black and white page.

With user analytics, businesses can better police email printing. By filtering out print jobs by type, they can quickly discover how many emails are being printed over any given time period.

For example, you might find that in one year, your organisation printed 500,000 emails, all of which were reproduced in colour - equating to £10,000 in print costs.

The black and white cost would be a fraction of that, therefore the ability to identify frivolous printing of this nature enables businesses to make significant savings.

If you find that lots of people are printing colour emails, there is always the option of defaulting all email job types as mono.

User analytics: naming and shaming

A further benefit of modern print management solutions is the ability to dig even deeper and look at jobs by user.

In our example above, we’d be able to harness the power of user analytics to investigate the individual users who contributed to the bulk of the email colour prints, export their details to excel and address the issue directly.

We were once asked to identify paper heavy processes in a company and discovered a data anomaly – one user had printed 672% more than others in his department. We dug deeper and found that he was an aspiring writer who had printed 72 copies of his manuscript for friends! 

‘Naming and shaming’ may not suit every organisation, but it’s one of many ways businesses can finally lift the lid on the inefficiencies of their printing operation.

Before naming and shaming anyone, be sure to check your internal printing policies (if they exist!) to see what it says about printing and what can and can’t be printed. You can’t pull someone up on bad printing behaviour if there’s nothing to say they can’t print personal documents (even if it is implied).

What’s for dinner tonight?

User analytics enables you to view jobs by file types and also search for file names so you can check how many coupons, manuals and even CVs are being printed. You might even find a significant number of PDFs heading through the queue that have been downloaded from the Internet.

It should come as no surprise that a significant number of personal print jobs result from web content and it’s not uncommon for employees to print the recipe for tonight’s dinner, which means BBC Good Food and allrecipes.co.uk may be among the most common web addresses discovered in the report.

An active printing policy

Some businesses will be relatively lenient when it comes to printing personal documents at work, but if you have ten-thousand people within your organisation, the cost of such jobs can soon mount up.

Internet printing is a particular problem, because with most web pages containing graphical elements - and, potentially, several banner adverts - colour printing devices will take a significant hit.

A print policy existing only as a PDF manual that employees read during their induction before neglecting entirely is next to useless. An active printing policy can only develop with a print management solution in place that enables organisations to identify problems and put a stop to them.

Far from a ‘big brother’ tactic, this is simply a case of keeping an eye on what users are doing. The ability to rank jobs by their most expensive and filter them by file type and user provides quick, actionable data for management.

For example - imagine if the fifth most expensive print job in your organisation cost £500 and was a PDF named ‘DSLRmanual.pdf’. Thanks to user analytics, you could identify the culprit and kindly ask them to stop printing such material at work.

Do you have the tools to find out the true cost of personal printing in your organisation?

An Introduction to User Analytics