Should Staff Printing Be Restricted?

[maniac]

Admin and SLT staff have un-restricted printing here, everyone else is limited.

We make use of department accounts within papercut to try and encourage department leaders to take responsibility for their departments printing. Each department gets 500 credits per member of full time teaching staff per term. colour prints cost 2 credits and B/W cost 1 credit per print. Copies are limited to 3 as we try and encourage the use of photocopying if they need class sets of printouts as it's cheaper. No repeat printing within 3 minutes either. Generally staff have accepted this, although some departments still manage their budgets badly and run out before the end of term regularly.

It has dramatically reduced out printing costs, although there's room for improvement as I still regularly find loads of disgarded printouts on the printers in the staffroom.

[rad]

Printers that are local are not monitored. Printers that are networked are.

1 mono sheet is 6 credits
1 colour sheet is 20 credits.

Teachers get 1000 credits a month, students get 500. If the printers were not monitored I am sure we would get class sets printed off, shame we are unable to do a monitor on the locally installed ones though. (this is RM)

[GrumbleDook]

If you don't restrict then you audit instead.

Examples ...

Each member of staff has the following limitation on networked mono printers
Can print no document large than 30 pages
Can print no more than 5 copies
Can print no than x pages in a given week.

Similar rules on colour laser printers

Each member of staff has x print credits and the costs per page are 1 credit per page on mono (single side), 0.75 credit per page on mono duplex, 10 credits per page on colour laser, 15 credits per page colour inkjet.
Credits are automatically set to 100 credits at the beginning of each week and a monthly report of credit used is given to both the HoD and Business Manager, allowing the BM to work out how much to top slice each department to cover printing costs (along side reprographics costs).

You could citch the allocate print credits side of things and then just set a proposed limit for the different departments, and anything over that comes out of the departmental budget ... you would be amazed how quickly the HoD decides to opt for the limit on credits for their staff.

This has to be tied in with the use of reprographics being cheaper to each department than using printers. If it isn't then they will continue to use printers. Make life easy for staff with sending stuff to reprographics ... there are a variety of solutions out there and the larger companies who supplier copiers have good offerings on this.

If you have a VLE / Learning Platform, try to make use of this to share documents instead of giving out paper. This further rewards departments that manage their documents electronically.

As always ... try to give solutions and alternatives if you start to lock things down ... it will lead to that compromise arrangement a lot quicker.

[mthomas08]

Yes, a hundred times over. School teachers will be the death of every rainforest on the planet the way they print. The problem is getting them to realise how much paper they are wasteing needlessly and actually careing about it.

Certain things unfourtunatly require paper, accounts for one thing thanks to government and accountants paper fetishes but that methodology is wasteful.

Convincing staff of this, even the eco nazis who will turn off computer moniters after every lesson to save the 1/1000000th of a cent worth of power will happily print out a class set of novels to their nearest printer, be it inkjet or not.

We agree here.

We are looking at a printing solution to limit:
How many pages
How many copies
Default Duplex
No personal Printers
Cut down Dept Printers
All down to their own account number

There will be some who cause a storm over it all, we already have three names on our list, these are staff who always refuse to follow any rules, recommendations or even play ball. Funnily enough these are also staff who do not save to H Drive.
In todays world it is just simply Lazy to keep printing, we have a reprographics Dept here and everything on high copies/pages should go through her but some staff will not like it.

[DCS]

We are looking at a printing solution to limit:
How many pages
How many copies
Default Duplex
No personal Printers
Cut down Dept Printers
All down to their own account number

[Pashers]

Papercut has a report on how many trees you are killing - how green you are. It might be worth displaying to staff how many trees they kill.
Hmm maybe I should have a message box saying "you are about to kill 0.001th of a tree, a thousand more and you've killed one honest tree"
Just a thought

[bossman]

At the moment we have a strict 200 printer credits a week quota for all staff except Admin staff who are monitored, 2 credits for a mono print and 5 or 10 credits for colour depending on what size A4 = 5 A3 = 10 and we also limit the staff to where they can print from:

All ICTSuites only students and ICT staff
Subject printers only the subject members

We have reprographics were staff can e-mail print jobs to for collection the next day at cost.

We also have a colour printer in the staff shared work area were the staff are allowed to print off 1 copy for reproducing 30 copies via the reprographics for hand outs.

This was all backed up by SLT and has proved to be saving at least 70% of costs against previous years.

Only one member of staff has complained and that member of staff has in no uncertain terms been told by SLT..............tough get used to it.