Unnecessary printing

[Sam3]

Hi all,

Was wondering how everyone tackles unnecessary printing? I get a lot of staff printing things off and never picking them up, it's a total waste of paper and ink, not to mention frustrating!

Thanks!

[localzuk]

Papercut NG or MF (if you want to integrate it with copiers).

Yearly subscription payment, runs on your print server and allows you to set up print quotas, routing rules, restrictions etc...

You can also get it to stick the user's username on the document when it prints.

[elsiegee40]

Print management software + SLT backing (Essential) + tight controls is the only way.

[glennda]

We did the papercut thing - We put the price on the screen so they physically saw that printing to the printer 10 yards away was 10x the price of printing to the photocopiers 100 yards away.

Most people then starting using photocopiers and we dumped a load of expensive printers.

[JonWPS]

With regard to that specific problem, we're in the process of setting up centralised pull printing on our ricoh copiers, meaning staff will need to login and manually print the jobs they send into the queue, meaning work won't simply be left in the tray waiting to be collected. Works from a confidentiality point of view as well, which has often been used in the past to justify the installation of additional printers in offices and other locations.

On a wider scale, we allocate each department a printing allowance for the year, which the HOD has control over, and charge them if they use more than this amount. Department heads can track the usage of staff within their departments, and staff are made very aware of just how much printing they're doing, and how much it's costing. Just making the cost of the printing visible as it's happening seems to have an impact on the way people use the printing facilities.

It's a constant battle though, I won't lie. If everyone had their way we'd have a printer in every room in the school; maybe more. I'm of the opinion that staff are encouraged to prepare properly, and this should be the case with printing as well. Not everything is going to be available right in front of you, right now.

[soveryapt]

Another +1 for PaperCut NG or MF. We use MF here. Currently, it only tracks printing and helps with budget tracking, but the thinking it to go with something similar to what JonWPS has said in terms of pull printing, or Print and Release as PaperCut call it. Basically, you send it to a virtual queue and the user has to log in (either to the copier if it's a MFD or to a local PC if it's a normal printer) to release their printing, otherwise it won't come out and won't waste the ink/toner/paper.

Certainly worth a look into as it's a great little piece of software and it's reasonably priced too!

Andy T

[GrumbleDook]

With regard to that specific problem, we're in the process of setting up centralised pull printing on our ricoh copiers, meaning staff will need to login and manually print the jobs they send into the queue, meaning work won't simply be left in the tray waiting to be collected. Works from a confidentiality point of view as well, which has often been used in the past to justify the installation of additional printers in offices and other locations.

On a wider scale, we allocate each department a printing allowance for the year, which the HOD has control over, and charge them if they use more than this amount. Department heads can track the usage of staff within their departments, and staff are made very aware of just how much printing they're doing, and how much it's costing. Just making the cost of the printing visible as it's happening seems to have an impact on the way people use the printing facilities.

It's a constant battle though, I won't lie. If everyone had their way we'd have a printer in every room in the school; maybe more. I'm of the opinion that staff are encouraged to prepare properly, and this should be the case with printing as well. Not everything is going to be available right in front of you, right now.

That might be worth doing a short talk about at a forthcoming meeting ...

[mthomas08]

Hi all,

Was wondering how everyone tackles unnecessary printing? I get a lot of staff printing things off and never picking them up, it's a total waste of paper and ink, not to mention frustrating!

Thanks!

We have purchased a print solution, the amount of printers/paper/ink we go through is insane as a result our new solution which is going to be tested in a block will fix our problems (hopefully). No matter where you print you will need to input your code for it to actually print off. If you dont collect then there is no paper waste.

We will also force duplex printing and any large printing or mass duplicates (photocopier being cheaper then printing) these will automatically be sent to reprographics.

Fingers crossed it all does what it says on the tin. We have urged staff to pause their printers and only allow what they want through.

[bondbill2k2]

We did the papercut thing - We put the price on the screen so they physically saw that printing to the printer 10 yards away was 10x the price of printing to the photocopiers 100 yards away.

Most people then starting using photocopiers and we dumped a load of expensive printers.

We encourage staff to use the photocopiers in the staff room and reception, IT teachers have their own little laser brother printers which are local to their computer and dont get alot of use, students cannot print here either they have a print folder on their desktop which they can write too only and are told to submit work into a folder with their teachers name on with their name in the footer. These are printed by the teacher or by the librarian at lunch and the end of each day, work is then put in the relevant teachers pigeon holes to collect.

We dont get huge amounts of waste tho, the only colour printers for teachers are in our office and the art department, only the art dep have print rights on that so its come to our office and face the wrath of wasted print :P Equitrac print management is used which we can set print prices for each printer for both colour and black/white, at the end of each month to bill departments for their printing, heads of departments also get a breakdown of who cost what where when why so they can ensure their departments are correctly using the printers. While it's not the most flexible system its cuts down on redundant paper and encourages proper usage. We also had a head of department ask if they could purchase a printer with their own budget if we choose it for them as they had purchased a job lot of around 25 toners, they are just billed for paper now and we maintain the monitoring on it for none department members to use and get charged back to their dept, proved a great saving as they print of entire copies of old exam sheets for each pupil fairly often.

[RobbieD]

We have a new campus opening shortly and the view there is to use a print solution as others have mentioned. Does anyone here use PCounter? We use it here now but was wondering if it works as well as Papercut?

[mikkydoos]

I ran a trial of PCounter in our school just to see who was printing what.

In a week, 500 kids printed about 100 copies between them.

Same week, just one member of staff printed 10,000 copies of the same document !!!!!!!!!

[RobbieD]

I ran a trial of PCounter in our school just to see who was printing what.

In a week, 500 kids printed about 100 copies between them.

Same week, just one member of staff printed 10,000 copies of the same document !!!!!!!!!

Must have had a big class that week!

[tech_guy]

We use PaperCut here and it has made a significant difference - waste has been reduced.

[tech_guy]

I ran a trial of PCounter in our school just to see who was printing what.

In a week, 500 kids printed about 100 copies between them.

Same week, just one member of staff printed 10,000 copies of the same document !!!!!!!!!

Yikes!

[elsiegee40]

What really galvanised our use of print management software (currently Print Manager Plus) was when the stats showed:

One third of printing was done by by one teacher!
One third of printing was done by one department. (EYFS natch!)
The remaining third was done by the whole of the rest of the school put together... including admin!

HT and Bursar united in a clamp down