Printing Policy for a ‘Paper-Less’ and more Efficient Office

A clear printing policy can help you increase business efficiency

As a printer vendor, people get quite surprised when they hear us talking about ‘Paper-Less’ office! But just because we sell printers, doesn’t mean we encourage printing more unnecessary paper.

There are several aspects of the business that, if handled properly, could let you hit two birds with one stone; increase your office efficiency and save money. Printing is easily overlooked when we are considering these two areas and that’s why having a clear printing policy is essential, after all sometimes it is the small things that count.

So what is a printing policy?

A company’s printing policy is a guideline intended for employees to follow in order to apply the best printing practices at the office. It usually covers issues such as restricting the use of colour or ensuring that double-sided printing is used whenever possible. Unfortunately, too many organisations lack a basic printing policy for staff.

In a recent survey which we conducted across EMEA*, we found out that 68.7% of the people surveyed don’t have a printing policy in their companies and only 24% do. Also in companies where printing policies do exist they are often ignored or poorly publicised. This is starkly illustrated by the fact that in  businesses with printers offering a double-sided, duplex facility; only 15% of employees ‘always’ used it. Conversely, 60% of staff with access to colour, ‘always’ or ‘often’ use the colour option, yet in the vast majority of office environments most standard print needs can be adequately accommodated in mono.

Introducing better print management techniques at the office would have a greater impact on the corporate bottom line, with potential savings of up to $19,600 million.** With the right management and infrastructure, printing tasks can be done faster and with less waste; saving precious manpower and materials not to mention increasing the business efficiency.

Here are just few points you could include while planning your printing policy

–    Proofreading: Always make sure your staff proofread the documents before printing for spelling mistakes or any errors to avoid re-printing
–    Double-Sided printing: Set double-sided printing as default and where possible advice staff to print two or four up (printing two or four pages on one sheet, works best with power point presentations)
–    Colour Printing: Restrict printing in colours except when needed and set black and white printing as default.
–    Print Range: Don’t print a 10 page document when you only need a couple of paragraphs or pages. Make sure you set your print range before printing.
–    Recycle: Reuse single sided sheets  and incoming faxes for notes
–    Disclaimer: Apply the ‘think before you print’ email disclaimer on all your outgoing e-mails.

These are just a few points to help you get started but the most important thing is to involve your staff in the development of the printing policy; ask them for suggestion to give them a sense of ownership. The key here is to put in place a pragmatic and enforceable printing policy, each individual user will be able to operate in a way which remains convenient to them yet takes account of the cost to the broader business and the environment.

*OKI Printing Solutions Survey: ‘So what exactly do you print?’
**cebr Survey: ‘Outsourced printing- A waste of paper?’ – An analysis of cost savings achievable around EMEA from in-house printing and improved print management

Why Buy an LED and not Laser Printer

Digital LED and laser technologies are alike due to the fact that they both use toner for cleaner, crisper images and they both use a heated roller to adhere the toner to the page. However, these two technologies are also widely different:

Simplicity: The most significant difference is that LED printers use a solid-state light source that is far less complex than laser, with no moving parts.

Quality: Digital LED uses multiple light-emitting diodes to create images one full line at a time. It provides a high concentration of light at the center of the dot and hence, delivers sharp details and rich color depth up to 1200×1200 dpi. Laser, on the other hand, relies on elaborate combinations of rotating mirrors and lenses. It renders each dot individually, scanning across each line and then returning back to the next sequence.

Speed: While an LED printhead writes image directly to the drum in one step, laser technology requires a seven-step process to accomplish this task. This process starts with a single light source, and then moves to focusing, reflecting and refracting the laser beam. Afterwards, the rotation of the polygon mirror takes place followed by synchronizing the start line and at last writing the image onto the drum.

Environment: Another major issue to be considered when choosing a printer or a set of printers for your company is Environment.  LEDs consume less electricity than other materials; they have been attracting attention recently as a useful lighting device to curb global warming due to the greenhouse gases released by electricity generation using fossil fuels. Even in its idle mode, an LED printer consumes 2 Watts of electricity compared to 10-20 Watts of that of a Lazer printer. A saving up to 80% on power during weekends and holidays is a valid reason to factor in when considering environmentally friendly products.  For big companies that use thousands of printers in its premises this saving impacts their green approach as well as their budgets.

At OKI we have chosen to develop digital LED technology because we believe it is a technological winner. LED technology is the future. Its various beneficial features are expected to lead a massive surge in high-speed color printers and ultra-high-speed large-scale printers which will make full use of LED’s characteristics. We can see the result now as LED technology continues to show a fast pace of continuing innovation while other technologies are stagnating.

So the question now is, if LED has proven to be worth the investment when will the rest of the vendors who still insist on using older technology join in and provide the HD Printing that answers their customer needs?

Business Efficiency … Your Key to Success

By: John Ross, GM

Smart printing is the key to print savings

We recently held the OKI Business Efficiency Seminar in Dubai to discuss ways to boost efficiency in the workplace and enhance productivity. The seminar also saw the launch of our new range of OKI colour printers, the C300 and C500 series. The event covered the areas of new efficiencies in finance, resource management and innovation and took a practical look at tools to help businesses drive for greater efficiency. We brought in expert speakers from different parts of the business world to look at the whole scope of improving business efficiency.

It’ll come as no surprise when we reveal that Oki’s contribution revolved around print, but there are some very real savings to be made by conducting a relatively fast and simple analysis of business printer usage.

Let’s look at some independent research on printing in the UAE alone.

• The annual print bill for UAE businesses is around AED 6,238 million
• Some AED 1,136 million is spent every year on outsourced printing
• The average office worker, according to the US Environmental Energies National Laboratory, responsible for printing 10,000 pages a year, using 12kg of paper (source)

So the main question here is how to make printing effective and efficient at the workplace.

Smart Printing is the answer, the recent Centre for Economics and Business Research (cebr) report commissioned by OKI showed earlier that a country like the UAE can save up to $110 million and spare the environment 9,000 tonnes of CO2 if business printing was more efficiently managed.

Management doesn’t know what is printed at the office, how often it’s printed or how much it cost, so the first step towards achieving efficient printing is to investigate the printing process at the workplace. You need to ask yourself the following questions:

–       How many pages do you print?

–       How many in color and how many B&W?

–       How can print be controlled?

–       What can be printed in-house rather than sending out to a print shop?

Nowadays and thanks to advanced technology several printing vendors provide you with the tools that can help you improve your printing process and increase business efficiency. At OKI for example, within every network printer and MFP box we supply, free of charge, solutions to increase your print effectiveness.

Tools such as; Print control, print supervision and secure print, can help you control who is printing what and how, which can help you control your costs. Also tools like Template manager allows you to print stuff like business cards, flyers, brochures and banners which helps you to shift a major part of your printing in-house.

Here are some of the cost savings that can be achieved by business sectors in the UAE with smart printing

© centre for economics and business research ltd,

In conclusion we can say that smart printing is good for business, environment and the economy, if best practice was applied across the UAE, businesses can save between AED 238 million and AED 540 million and the region’s economic output would rise by AED 724 million.

So the next time you start reviewing your business and identify ways to boost your efficiency and productivity; don’t overlook printing!

If you have the time, please take 3 minutes to answer our survey on Business Efficiency

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NKTX6KF