By establishing a printing policy at your company, you can drastically reduce waste and save money. A printing policy outlines rules and standards regarding how employees can print. This includes everything from establishing limits on how many pages each employee can print, to mandatory default settings, and when color printing is allowed.
Although printing policies can be useful at businesses of every size, they are perhaps more beneficial at enterprise-level organisations, where printing waste is often substantial.
But, printing policies are not a one-size-fits-all arrangement. Before tackling the process of creating printing rules and enforcing them, you need to be sure you’re ready. Here are a few questions to ask before implementing a printing policy.
- Do we have upper-level management support? – Without buy‐in from top executives, you can’t really establish any company-wide policies. But, more that that, you also need management to agree to abide by any printing policies that are in place so they demonstrate proper printing behaviors for all employees.
- Do we have the right equipment? – It’s easy to establish rules, but it’s much more difficult to actually enforce them. Unless you have the right equipment that ensures users print on both sides of the paper, or only release print jobs when an employee enters their ID number at the MFP. Some older equipment might not have these functionalities, so it could be time to upgrade to more advanced and energy efficient hardware.
- Would a document management solution help? – Employees often print unnecessarily because they lack the tools and resources to go “paperless.” Relying too heavily on paper documents is costly, inefficient, and requires the use and storage of lots of paper. But a document management system is designed to automate document processes, thereby significantly reducing the need to print.
At R. L. Mark we assist clients to implement effective Printing Policies. Contact our office to discuss how we might help you implement a Printing Policy.
