Realistic Print Limit

[Mr_Jiminy]

What have others got as a realistic print limit for staff members?

 

Carte blanche rights or specific print limits?

[elsiegee40]

This absolutely needs to be owned by the Senior Leadership Team. Without their agreement, you will fail big time.

 

How much is enough is a bit like asking the length of a piece of string.

 

Early Years staff are programmed to print off at least 400,000 photos a day each.

Some teachers have duties that generate more paperwork than others.

It may be cheaper to photocopy than to allow a teacher to run off 30 copies of the worksheet they have produced.

Does everybody need to print colour all (or even any) of the time? Or does a cunning bit of double installing with the default being black and white get most things printed mono?

 

You and your SLT need to understand which printing habits are blowing the budget and thus need to be controlled and which can be tolerated.

[Mr_Jiminy]

Folks I'm never ever, ever, EVER going to make a decision like that, it would always be pushed into the laps of my clients.

 

I simply wanted to know what other schools had in place for quota limits.

[CyberDrac]

We spent an entire year running the Print Management System in a silent, monitoring only mode, to establish a baseline and identify peaks and troughs in usage. It also gave use a years worth of data on running costs so that the price per page were accurate. We also ensured that there were financial benefits to green approaches like using double sided being cheaper than two single sided sheets and similar, and where our large MFD are cheap to run, sometimes large print runs are cheaper when run through the faster printing devices that the reprographics technician operates and so the carrot and stick of barring large print runs (over 100 copies (enough for a class set)) while ensuring that the cheaper services offered by the technician were made obvious (which also prevented the machines from being tied up and blocking student use).

 

edit : we churned through the figures to establish values that 90%, 95% and 99% of students in each year were able to keep to when they weren't under any restrictions and that has worked well

We also made sure that there were mechanisms in place to request long term increases for students where additional high printing was to be expected, and short term requests that could be processed quickly and charged to the department request the extra to the student.

Edited May 22, 2014 by CyberDrac

[Danp]

All our departments have their own mono printer and most are getting a colour too. They pay for their own toner on those so I dont care how much they use them.

 

'Public' printers are set to use their credits through Pcounter, they get 1000 credits per term (1 credit per b&w, 5 per colour) and only a handful of staff need a top up.

[smidsy]

Just about to implement a scheme similar to @CyberDrac. We have been running Papercut for a year so we know what each class print (primary school) so I can sit down with SLT and create an allowance based on these figures. Sure we will create allowances for SLT or SEN groups and the user's will be able to choose which account to charge it against. This will be enforced and any printing over this will come from department budgets. I am then intending to drop these allowances by a percentage each year to encourage lower and lower printing.