The Road to 'Wise Print'–Part 3

Print the right quantity at the right quality for the right price

In my last posting, I proposed that by better managing your print environment, you can pay less for print, while having a dramatic environmental impact, and offered "print less" as the ultimate way to realize both benefits. I also claimed that my "itty bitty rules for why people print" are helping to keep print volumes from going down in spite of today's high levels of computerization. But, in fact, print volumes are actually going up!

This is due to a number of factors, not the least of which is that the proliferation–and in most cases the commoditization–of imaging devices such as printers, copiers and scanners has contributed significantly to the dramatic increase in print volumes in recent years.

Another reason is that because the speed and quality of office printers is much better these days, especially on the colour front, a wave of new applications is enabling the creation and printing of high-quality, highly customized marketing materials. As a result, a growing amount of work that has traditionally gone to commercial printers is now being printed internally, thus driving up print volumes internal to the organization.

It may come as a surprise, but Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems are also driving up print volumes. It's easy to be misled into thinking that an ECM solution, or a collaboration solution such as Microsoft SharePoint, with documents being created, stored and shared electronically, would result in less hardcopy printing. Not so! Studies show that, on average, an electronic document is printed four times–it's a lot easier to distribute a document in electronic format, for example, so many more people get to see it and thus can choose to print it … ah, there's that Haptic Response kicking in again that I mentioned last time! By way of example, the studies indicate that when e-mail is introduced into an environment, printing increases by 40%.

Against this backdrop of increasing print volumes, and thus printing costs and environmental impact, Compugen's "print less" approach is resonating well with many customers. However, in the book I'm working on–"EcoWise Print: Helping the Earth AND your Bottom Line"–I extend this thinking to incorporate the whole gamut of additional best practices associated with optimizing and better managing a print environment. I call it "wise printing"—printing the right quantity at the right quality for the right cost.

In my next post, I'll finish up the first part of this series by exploring some of the ways to actually reduce print volumes, and lay the groundwork for exploring other aspects of a Managed Print Services environment.