Sustainable Print Management: Cut costs, not trees

Sure, this might be justifiable in the case of belles-lettres and comic books. However, more often than not, lot of employees click the “print” button without giving it a second thought.

You pay for every page

Paper consumption still shows an unpleasantly growing tendency. Not only do the tall piles of unnecessarily printed files indisputably have a negative environmental impact – they can also get quite costly. Your printing expenses can become a quickly growing item on your budget list. But no need to be terrified of turning on your MFP in the morning. We bring you some tips to help with your print cost reduction. They are all based on the essential assumption that every printed page costs money.  

It's easier than you thought

Let’s start at the very beginning – the creation of the to-be-printed document. There are some ways to lower the ink and paper usage already in the desktop/online text editor. You can for example broaden the document margins, so more text can fit in. Or get creative with a printing-friendly font, reduce line spacing, delete unnecessary graphic elements... You can even change the text color from the omnipresent black to a brighter shade to reduce ink consumption. To avoid adjusting your document settings every time, it’s a good idea to make a template, where you can also copy text from various programs or apps, e.g. when you need (or do you, actually?) to print an email.  

Step two is the smart setting of your printer, where you can make some magic happen. Apart from the absolute obvious like fitting multiple pages on one side or printing double-sided (Put a little sign on the copier saying on which side of the paper the printer prints to avoid the surrealism of printing over a page that is already full.), you can set “draft mode”, which lowers the machine’s resolution. Also, consider what you “feed” your printer with. While for a contract or promo material it’s understandable to choose a silky, snow-white paper, for everyday business recycled or lighter weight paper might be enough. And last but not least, your printers are not necessarily standalone machines outside your reach – they can be connected to a software that helps you monitor your printing costs and workflow.  

What about the ink?

When it comes to the environmental impact of printing, the issue is frequently just reduced to paper usage. However, there is another component that tends to fly under the radar, the consumption of cartridges. These ink containers are made of various toxic components, are not the easiest to recycle, and take a very long time to decompose. Plus, as we all know, they are not the cheapest thing to spend your money on, so it’s in everyone’s best interest to prolong their lifespan. One of the most effective steps to take in this case is to reduce color-printing to minimum, which implies thinking twice before printing a picture, restricting this function to certain employees or adopting any ink-reducing measures listed above. 

All of these tips can be very useful for cutting printing costs, but they don’t address another elephant in the room – money that is wasted in the form of time. If there is such a thing as man-days (and woman-days, to be sure!), there are man-hours and man-minutes – and how many of those have you or your employees spent peering over complicated printer settings, lately?  

With the right tools at hand, minutes turn into seconds. Operating a printer shouldn’t take much more than that, honestly. When you have MyQ’s unique personalized UI on the printer’s control panel, you can fill your personal home screen only with functions that fit you best. Instead of figuring out how much DPI is enough DPI, set up your MyQ Embedded Terminal with advanced scanning, printing and copy functions that you use the most, and launch an automatic process with a single tap.    

Apart from everything mentioned above, bear in mind that with thanks to MyQ’s advanced reporting, MFPs can be easily connected to various BI tools, which means you never lose track of your printing expenses. With MyQ’s printing solution, no penny will ever be lost again.  

Control printing costs with MyQ Smart for free!