Do your customers know what their employees are really printing? What if we told you that 3 percent of all pages printed from web browsers are—get this—recipes! And that March Madness and fantasy football documents represent 3 percent of printing in any environment based on an annual average. A study by Print Audit recently revealed these and a number of other interesting facts about printing habits and trends.
You can use stats like this to convince your clients that it is time for a print management solution. Such solutions let them keep tabs on who is printing what, to help them track costs, eliminate wasteful printing and ultimately save money. Fortunately, BLI has reported on several such solutions recently to help you discern what could best help your customers and suit their particular printing needs.
In BLI’s report on Print Audit 6, we found that solution to be a flexible print management and cost recovery solution with many strengths, including its modular design that lets organizations add components to fit their growth; “page by page” color analysis; and multiple page-size tracking, rules-based messaging, and intuitive reporting tools. Plus, administrators will like that it’s easy to deploy and use and that the client software is virtually transparent to end users.
We also recently tested PaperCut MF 12, which is also among the best software platforms in its class on the market. In addition to providing all the necessities for cost accounting, control, and recovery, it also includes outstanding print management tools that can help organizations of all sizes get a handle on their document output and reduce TCO, all for a price lower than many other competitive solutions.
Another entry to consider is Technesis Print Control System 6, a highly configurable print management and cost recovery solution that gets high marks for its superb ease of use and administration and automated reporting.
And of course, no conversation about in-house print management/cost tracking tools would be complete without mentioning Equitrac Office 4.2, a flexible solution that’s compatible with virtually all MFPs and printers. Equitrac Office delivers mixed-color-and-black job analysis and the ability to enforce duplexing and restrict color output by application type. Plus, administrators can establish policies to promote cost-effective or “green” printing – so when your customers see stats like 60 percent of all pages printed from Internet Explorer are printed in color, they won’t have to worry about their bottom line.
BLI’s evaluations reveal the important differences that characterize these solutions, so be sure to read our full reports linked above and share them with your clients to determine which one is best suited for their specific needs and budget. Those printouts may turn out to be consumables well spent.
