How much is bad user printing behaviour costing you? Who’s printing 15,000 pages in colour and why?

This is particularly useful information for large departments with many users undertaking their own individual printing tasks, but the volumes involved make it hard for businesses to analyse the printing efficiency of each user.

One of the key benefits of user analytics is the ability to quickly and easily identify bad printing behaviour.

Shifting from bird’s eye to ground-level reporting

Data on each of your devices has been accessible via traditional print management solutions such as PaperTrack, Safecom and Serato for many years. But while those solutions do a great job at providing ‘follow-me’ printing and usage reporting, the latter is usually rather static.

Traditional print management analytics simply offer a fixed list of jobs. The resulting spreadsheet would therefore only ever show a big list of users, their department, the total mono versus colour volume and cost.

If you simply want a high level view of what everyone is doing with the print infrastructure, this may be sufficient, but what if you want to drill in a bit further?

Hunting down the colour-hungry user

Let’s say you’re suspicious that an individual or department used a lot of colour last month. Why did they do that? What was it they were printing and which device did they use?

Static reports simply don’t provide this depth of information and may lead you to the wrong conclusion.

Instead, let’s take our seemingly colour-hungry user example and employ user analytics to get to the bottom of what’s going on.

The investigative journey would play out as follows:

1) Starting at department level, you’ll quickly note spikes in print usage; user analytics enables us to see who’s printed colour or black and white and the volume by day. 

(Example shows anonymised department data)

2) In this case, clearly there’s one person in particular who’s using a great deal of colour, and we can now look at that individual user to see what they did.

3) Once at user level, we can see how consistent their printing is, and... oh - look, it appears this person actually clocked up the bulk of that colour use in one day. Curious…

(Example shows anonymised user data, red box highlights printing spike and volume)

4) It doesn’t appear to be consistent, either; this is the first time the user has printed colour at that volume. What’s more, if we delve a little further into the user analytics, we discover that it all took place at the start of the day.

(Example shows anonymised in-depth look at user printing spike broken down into transaction type, document type, number of transactions and volume by colour and mono)

A detailed picture of the printing task soon builds. In this example, we could dig even deeper and discover that the jobs were PDFs - numbering 15,000 in total - all containing twenty pages each. We can even find out what the name of the document being printed was to see if it was necessary to print it.

Now we understand what’s going on!

Offering fair, substantiated feedback to users

With user analytics, department heads have far more information to go on when assessing the efficiency of the print operation. The employee in our example above could then be offered the most relevant feedback or training to ensure they make more effective use of printers in future. If you wish, personal details like names can be anonymised within the tool, or alternatively, personal details can be pulled into the system from Active Directory, with the ability to edit them if they are out of date.

Equally, this kind of data may confirm that what could easily be assumed bad printing behaviour is, in fact, the opposite. Small tweaks to behaviour might be all that’s required.

For example:

• If they were simplex jobs, should they be defaulted to double-sided?
• Are large print jobs being sent to desktop devices when they should be directed to mono, cost-effective printers?
• Do people rely on the wrong file format, thus increasing the length of time the printer has to process and complete the job?

In a matter of seconds, user analytics will lift the lid on department printing in your operation by zooming into the finer details that were once hidden.