Printing less with no user impact - the magic of Follow-You Printing
Posted by Tristam Wallace on Thu, Jun 23, 2011 @ 02:03 PM
In a webinar we held yesterday with Park Hill School District, the school's director of IT referred to Follow-You Printing as "magic". He was referring to the fact that it "just works" and that users really don't have any clue what is happening behind the scenes.
I thought about the term "magic", and I think it's a great term to describe one of the largely unexpected benefits of Follow-You Printing. Using pull printing can reduce printed output by 10-20% on average...without your users ever knowing it or consciously changing their behavior. It is like gaining an extra 5 miles per gallon without changing your driving habits.
The secret behind the magic is simple. When you add Follow-You Printing to your print workflows, print jobs are sent to the Equitrac print server. The workflow for the user doesn't change...they just hit print. But, the print job stays in the print queue until a user releases it at the printer by authenticating. Print, then retrieve...nothing new there.
But -- and we see this with almost every implementation of Follow-You Printing -- a sizeable percentage of documents that are printed never get retrieved. The reasons for this are countless...a newer version was printed, the user got distracted and forgot about the document, the user realized they didn't need to print it, etc. Without Follow-You Printing, all of these documents would have been printed then likely discarded immediately.
The staggering part of this is the amount of documents that get submitted to the server but aren't printed. Liverpool John Moores University told us that on many devices it was up to 25% of the jobs. Park Hill Schools showed a range of 5-15% depending on the printer. And we've heard many more stories in the 10-20% range.
Think about what just a 10% drop in print volume could mean to your organization. Follow-You Printing can kick start a print management program -- with no impact to users -- and arm you with the data to create awareness of wasteful print habits that will lead to long term, significant savings. If you can save 10% without changing behavior...imagine the savings that come from adding that to a conscious effort to print more responsibly.