How Your Business Can Save Money by Tracking Printing

Inefficiencies involved in utilising manual processes and pushing paper in the office can soon add up.

Because of the continual demand for information – invoices, forms, contracts, approvals – to be secure and accessible, manually filing documents and the creation of paper trails may cause a severe limitation to the capacity of an organisation to compete.

Print Audit – How Can it Be of Benefit to Your Business?

Innovation starts by motivating your team to seek small ways to make improvements to business workflows. That may include becoming more productive, helping the environment, or being more efficient.

One area to make simple but impactful changes is within your print environment. Printing is a cost that can be reduced for most organisations, so it’s wise to ensure that your devices operate efficiently, that your staff are responsible for their printing habits, and your print supplier is providing you with a good deal.

What is a Print Audit?

Through a print audit, a business can understand the effectiveness of their print infrastructure. A print audit involves reviewing the current technology and conducting a survey of all on-site devices. This helps to identify:

• Device locations
• Output volumes
• Staff behaviours
• Machines that are over utilised
• Your entire print environments’ cost
• Broken or failing devices

How a Print Audit Can Benefit Your Business

Reveal print costs that are hidden

Among the main reasons why print audits are carried out is the review of the printing set-up and the identification of expenses and where processes can be improved as a way of saving money. Basically, a Print Audit shows how you can save money in your business by seeing what is being printed.

 

Print audits highlight devices that are over and underutilised as well as machines that are failing.

Immediate hardware savings can be made by the consolidation of the print fleet, the removal of unnecessary devices, the replacement of failing devices, and/ or swapping over legacy device location so that maximum efficiency is achieved.

Reduction of printing volumes and becoming greener

For most organisations, arguably the most difficult aspect is a sheer lack of control and visibility they maintain over their print infrastructure.

It is possible to point the finger at various individuals but through a print audit, you get a good concept of the amount of printing done for each device in every department.

From this point, it’s easy to introduce policies to reduce paper usage.

For this aspect of the print audit, it’s mainly about increased environmental awareness. With heightened visibility, it’s simpler to implement measures to become greener.

Tighten up the security of your print infrastructure

These days, every organisation must have a robust level of digital security in place. However, more often than not, print technology is overlooked.

With a print audit, a complete security analysis is carried out to highlight any gaps that exist within your overall operational processes.

Implement Document Management Solutions

Document management solutions (DMS) are available to make the best of an organisation’s key resources: money and time.

Through the implementation of DMS, an organisation is able to:

Automate tasks and improve process efficiency

Employees can work more efficiently with document management software because they have instantaneous access to information. This software likewise enables organisations to implement workflow automation that keeps business processes moving.

A document management system can also help an organisation to:

• Streamline the distribution of documents through automated workflow routing as well as notification, thereby improving accountability.
• Use more intelligent search methods.
• More efficiently manage organisational activities.
• Create document copies and distribute them as easily as it is to send an email.
• Greatly reduce the number of lost documents.
• Reduce clerical mistakes through the automation of optical character recognition and indexing.

Improve overall communication within the organisation

With document management systems it’s much easier to share documents with clients and colleagues electronically. This can be achieved either at the office or elsewhere.

A good quality DMS enables:

• You to gain access to the DMS remotely.
• The seamless integration of the DMS with your website.
• The balancing of accessibility and security.

Cut time waste by reducing the amount of time spent on filing documents

When a DMS is implemented, organisations can use their time more effectively to:

• Track documents that need to be signed by various personnel.
• Retrieve documents and various other essential information.
• Respond more rapidly to customer queries.
• Immediately respond to client and auditor information requests.
• Provide better customer service.

Minimise costs involved with additional hiring and paper storage

There are upfront costs involved in the implementation of a document management system. Nevertheless, over the long term, it does lead to savings. It’s possible to make savings over the long term by:

• Reducing the amount of downtime in an organisation which can be caused b fire, theft, or flooding.
• Completely eliminating the costs involved in off-site storage.
• The replacement of space used for paper storage by more productive activities that are revenue-generating.

What’s the Bottom Line?

It’s possible to completely overhaul the majority of manual processes with document management software. The digitising of documents and the control of electronic documents means that organisations can eliminate paper storage, improve communication, and streamline operations.

With this kind of boost in efficiency, organisations will enjoy the benefits by reducing clerical tasks in favour of revenue-producing tasks.