How a sustainable print strategy can help cut costs

Sustainability performance is something businesses are becoming increasingly proud of.  

For instance, between 2011 and 2013, the number of companies that published corporate sustainability reports rose by 72%. Disclosing information about the sustainability of a business might be considered as important as growth forecasts.

This is where print fits in.

In some cases, printing can be one of the largest sources of waste in a business. Thankfully,  it can also be remarkably simple to reduce and plays a vital role in most corporate sustainability reports.

Here’s how sustainable printing can help your business cut costs and drive efficiency:

It eliminates unnecessary devices

Your company might have far more printers than it actually needs.

At the heart of a sustainable print strategy is the desire to consolidate the number of output devices, because despite their increasingly green credentials, the more you have, the more energy the business consumes.

With managed print services (MPS), the ability to monitor how employees print enables you to identify underutilisation before it becomes an expensive problem.

Combine this with automation, improved document security and mobile printing and your business could see cost reductions of up to 30%.

It’ll build a culture of sustainability

People drive sustainability in business, and if your workforce can be educated about their use of printing devices, you’ll be able to align strategic goals with greener policies and successfully cut costs.

Once you have access to the data that reveals exactly how the organisation and its workers uses print, you can engage employees by demonstrating the company’s desire to reach its sustainability goals.

Workers can suddenly be given powerful reminders about the roles they play in achieving those goals, and because people usually want to do the right thing, the eagerness to participate in such initiatives should result in a culture that has sustainability at its heart.

It’ll make sense of Big Data

‘Big Data’ - we hear it more and more often in modern society, but the challenge lies in untangling it and making sense of the wealth of information we now have at our disposal.

By working with print experts, you can interpret the big data provided by managed print services to create a sustainable print strategy driven by smart workflows and tight resource management.

It’s often the simple stuff that Big Data reveals. For example, imagine finding out that over half of your printing came from email reproduction and websites; you’d be able to introduce policies that curtail non-critical printing and educate staff on sustainable practices.

It’ll speed up content management

There’s a common, hidden cost that lies within every poor print strategy.

The process of storing and retrieving documents in your organisation may be highly inefficient, yet with a content management system that’s driven by a sustainable print strategy, you could cut up to 80% of the time it takes to find business-critical information.

Effective document capture, management and collaboration plays a vital role in sustainable printing, and will dramatically improve your ROI.

Does your business have a sustainable print strategy, or is it suffering from a bloated device base and costly printing habits?