Alexander Welsh is director of the federal government practice at Notable Solutions.
The federal government has performed extensive analysis on the cost of printing and issued specific recommendations and policy on how to contain and lower these costs.
Four general areas impact printing costs: page volume; number of print devices; consumables; and labor and back-end architecture. An effective output management solution addresses these four costs at the enterprise level and supports compliance with government directives.
A 2013 report by Gartner ("Cost Cutting Initiatives for Office Printing") notes that a well-executed, comprehensive output management (OM) solution is required to reach a 30 percent reduction in total office print costs. This supports the 2012 GSA "PrintWise" campaign that was enacted to change employee print behavior and, if followed, could save taxpayers more than $330 million by 2015.
A best-in-class solution would feature integrated print management capabilities, including secure distribution of documents to printers and other destinations, control of office printing and output, and real-time monitoring of device status. It should provide robust printing metrics and advanced rules-based printing across an entire fleet of print devices.
The following recommendations are given for implementing a comprehensive output management solution:
1. Centralized Tracking & Reporting: This incorporates device meter reads and information on content and origin of printed documents to identify trends at the user, department and enterprise levels. With detailed reports, and dashboard capabilities, trends in print behavior are identified across all devices and users.
2. Pull Printing: This method requires user identification and thus can eliminate costs associated with handling sensitive data exposure and breaches from documents not retrieved. For U.S. federal agencies, improved security and regulatory compliance can be supported with pull printing integrated with government issued Common Access Cards (CAC) or Personal Identification Verification (PIV) cards, which support compliance with Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12) by requiring two-factor authentication to access network data.
3. Rules-Based Printing: this type of printing controls output and costs by analyzing print jobs based on the user, the application printed from, and specific attributes of the print job.
For example:
■Print jobs of 100+ pages re-route to a production printer
■Print jobs from email are automatically printed in black and white
■Print jobs are automatically routed to a networked printer with a lower cost per page
■"Confidential" or "Classified" documents are sent to an authorized printer
A robust output management solution should leverage any attribute of the document to enforce a specific print policy and provide "pop ups" to the user to recommend a change in print output.
4. Centralized Management: a core location for print drivers is necessary to reduce cost through efficiency and associated reduction in print support infrastructure.
To enable users to print, print drivers must be installed or shared to each individual user. With a universal system, a single driver is deployed to users to enable network printing. An administrator simply needs to register the new driver with the centrally managed system and users will be able to utilize the universal print driver for the new device.
If these four areas of output management are addressed, the objective of realizing long-term and sustainable cost savings is much more attainable. The extensive amount of industry research and corresponding government policy provides overwhelming justification for paper-intensive organizations to investigate and implement an OM strategy to realize these goals over the long haul.
Change management should be considered as part of any project to deploy an output management solution to minimize the impact on users. Based on experience with enterprise customers, a three-phase approach is recommended:
■Track all print output, but make no changes to current user print functionality
■Implement "suggestive" capabilities such as pop-ups at the time of print that inform the user of the most cost-effective ways to print. Deploy pull-print capabilities but keep direct-to-printer functionality in place
■Implement full enforcement of rules-based printing. Consolidate multiple Windows print queues and print servers to be managed centrally.
