The best printers in the world can deliver sub-par results if they’re not deployed correctly, are not used as they should be, and are not located in the most sensible places.
Read more: Get the most out of your business printing
The way your printers are set up—the number and types you have and where they are located—can make a huge difference to the ability of you and your employees to save time at work.
For instance, if your printer is at the far end of the passage, or far from the desks of people who actually use it most, you can lose several minutes of productivity every time a staff member prints a document. It might not sound like much, but over a year, it adds up to more than a full day’s work per staff member.
Consider the location of the different printers in your organisation. In general, printers should be closest to the people who print most often—not necessarily those who print the greatest number of pages. For instance, someone who prints ten pages once a day can afford to be further away than someone who prints a single page ten times a day.
"Someone who prints ten pages once a day can afford to be further away than someone who prints a single page ten times a day."
And if it happens in your business that bottlenecks form at specific printers, with people standing around waiting to collect their printing, then consider changing which printer is assigned to which person, or consider acquiring more printing devices.
It can make a telling difference if you deploy your printers to ensure that everyone has easy access to the type of print device they need. Using the information gleaned from your printing needs assessment, work with your printer provider to devise a mix of devices and the relevant access to capabilities, for example by granting access to capabilities such as colour and A3 printing to those users who need it, but not to those who don't.
By achieving a balanced mix of large departmental devices and smaller machines, anyone using the printers will save at time at work. This maximises productivity and reduces cost associated with support, consumables and maintenance of hardware.
Business printer provider Brother estimates that this approach yields savings of more than 20% on average. Most of the saving comes from reduced IT support, but consumables and hardware repair also deliver significant savings, with the cost of devices and installation also reducing.
Addressing complexity
A few minutes invested upfront to automate routine tasks can save time at work in the long run. If you scan, for instance, and then send the scans to specific email addresses, many printers can be programmed to perform the entire process at the touch of a button.
As people can find printers fairly complicated, especially if they want to do anything other than the routine tasks they’ve learned to do, it makes sense to have one expert staffer assigned to every printer. This staff member should get to know a bit more about what the device is capable of and how to give it the necessary commands. Having someone like that on hand rather than having staff members trying to decipher a guide or, worse still, blindly stabbing at buttons, will help you get not only much more out of your printer, but also get more out of your staff.
If you have a printer with extra printer trays, fill them all when you load paper. That means you can work for longer without having to refill the trays again.
"A few minutes invested upfront to automate routine tasks can save time at work in the long run."
If you have a mobile workforce, it would help things along if printers are set up so that people can print directly from their smart phones, tablets or laptops to the printer, via the cloud. If you have representatives out on the road, for instance, you can set it up so that they can take an order and print it to the office printer for a colleague to pick up and fulfil the order.
IT support
Apart from staff spending time replenishing printer consumables, walking to printers, waiting for their printing or trying to solve printer problems, printing tends to take up a disproportionate amount of your IT support. This can be avoided by limiting the variety of printers you have, as this reduces the diversity of software support needed and the breadth of knowledge required by your support staff. It also means that the steps used to set up one device can simply be repeated for others of the same type.
An effective way to save time with printing is to outsource its management to a third party, using what is known as Managed Print Services.
For more expert techniques on getting the most out of your office printer, download our free guide below.
