Without a goal or objective, it’s easy to dismiss the use of print analytics as just more business data, or worse, you just see the analytics and assume everything is normal and that’s just what people need to print, so why question it?

When inefficient processes are being followed throughout the business, printing can become very costly and because it’s a business process that the company has always followed, there is no reason to question it.

By more actively monitoring printing analytics, you can not only pick up trends where print usage is higher, you can also identify heavy paper processes that could otherwise be optimised and even digitised in some cases.

Like most business processes, an objective or goal is often needed before you think to look any deeper into why people print so much or why it’s costing so much.

The objective behind monitoring print analytics will vary from business to business - from a company wide initiative to become more sustainable or optimise processes to a budget or cost analysis where printing costs are seen to be too high.

In this case, we’re going to consider the latter: cost.

How print user analytics help to cut costs

A print user analytics tool, such as CompleteView User Analytics, helps you to identify quick wins to optimise your printing infrastructure on a continual basis, but also provides you with the data and analytics you need to quantify how much you can save by going digital.

The software can identify wasteful or inefficient tasks by providing the insights you need into your printing fleet and users. It provides an on-going view of the document output by taking a data feed from a print management application.

By monitoring and reviewing the analytics, it is made much easier to spot inefficiencies such as high printing volumes by a certain user and department.

Once the high-print volume is identified, you can take a deeper dive into what process is causing the printing, why it’s being done and how it could be done differently.

By optimising the process - whether it be from reducing the amount printed, utilising a printer better suited for the job at hand or switching to mono-printing if it’s being printed in colour, you can begin to cut the costs associated with printing.

The print analytics will even show you the costs of print by user or department so you can very quickly see if the process optimisation has had an effect on printing costs.

Example: How CompleteView User Analytics was used to cut costs

As part of a document and workflow assessment for a major retailer, a significant inefficiency in their Customer Overpayment reporting process was discovered using CompleteView.

The report was printed every day, in each of their stores – even if there was nothing to report. Every version (even the blank ones) was reviewed, manually approved and numbered.

The printed reports were then filed for two months before being archived on site and finally, after a period of six months to two years, shredded.

Taking labor, services, materials and other costs into account, plus eight other reports that were handled in a similar way, the cost of this process was $72,000 per annum per store.

Almost none of the 15 steps in this process were adding value to the business. Most of them involved printing a report, handing it out to different departments, signing it, and filing it. The workflow could be rationalised to just one or two steps and automated by digitising the process so reports were handled electronically rather than manually, which would also result in lower costs and improve productivity.

By using print user analytics, it’s possible to identify processes that don’t add value or are simply inefficient and could be optimised. In doing so, you could cut costs and make the business process better moving forward.