Print management: control, secure and streamline print

Don't let printing and print costs get out of hand

Organisations of all sizes and in all sectors share a number of fundamental challenges, including keeping costs in check, protecting corporate information, and ensuring everyone can work efficiently and productively.

Print is one area where it's easy to let things get out of control, if you don't know who's printing what, which users or teams are printing and copying the most, or how much it all costs. Documents may go uncollected — wasting money and resources, and potentially putting sensitive information at risk. And if a printer develops a fault, how easily can users switch to an alternative device?

You can solve these challenges and more using print management solutions to manage and protect your entire scan and print infrastructure. You'll be able to:

• Gain an overview of your organisation's print, copy and scan activities
• Monitor who's printing what and when
• Keep costs in check by implementing print rules and policies
• Protect information and reduce waste through user authentication
• Optimise workflow productivity and print queue management

Take control, gain insights, increase flexibility

You'll want to choose a print management solution that offers the features and functionalities that align with your organisation's needs. Among the features you'll want to consider are:

User authentication. With centralised control over identities, you ensure that users have to authenticate themselves at a device to release a print job. As well as protecting sensitive information from prying eyes and reducing wasted print, this allows users to send a print job to any networked printer. Some print management solutions also make it easy to manage secure printing from mobile devices, including BYOD.

Monitoring and reporting. Allows you to track and monitor usage in real time through regular, scheduled and on-demand reporting. You have the data you need to identify and investigate excessive or other anomalous usage by an individual or department. You can also create executive reports that provide top-level management summaries and sustainability information.

User and cost management. You can manage and charge back costs by assigning users to cost centres, or enabling them to select the relevant cost centre, billing or project code before printing a document. You can also assign price lists to different devices, cost centres and users.

And by creating print rules or policies, you can ensure tighter cost management by allowing different user roles to access different devices and features. For example, you can make duplex printing the default for everyone; or limit colour printing to certain roles.

Centralised user and cost management can help you reduce your spend on print services by as much as 30%*

(* Cost Reduction, YSoft, https://www.ysoft.com/en/solutions/business-challenges/reduce-costs)

Cost accounting and budget management. To provide cost control and flexibility, choose a print management solution that allows you to assign print budgets to users, with the option to top up their accounts. In an environment such as a university, for example, this allows you to give students a free print quota that they can add to as required.

Print queue management. If you run an in-house print room, you may want to choose a print management solution that offers efficient management of your production print queue in addition to your office print queue.

Workflow management. If you're on a digital transformation journey, you may want to be sure the solution you choose can also help you develop efficient scanning workflows to further optimise everyone's productivity.