How much printing does your school do?

[maniac]

This is the first year we've run print quotas properly here, and I'm astounded at the amount of paper that flies through our printers.

 

Since september, as a whole school we've printed 86,000 A4 pages. Considering we're only a school of 420 students with around 80 or so staff I think that's quite a lot. Out of that 86,000 pages only 18% of the printing is down to students, again I was astounded that the percentage was so low.

 

For comparison purposes, anyone fancy sharing their stats here?

 

Mike.

[MYK-IT]

Hi Mike,

 

Can i ask how you collated the stats?

 

Have you used a Print Management solution?

 

Only reason I am asking is that I already know we spend alot each month on toner and ink, but looking at where we can reduce costs (especially in the current economic climate).

[featured_spectre]

Rougly 500 pages a day since September, an none of it is kids as they have to ask me to print, and as a paperless department I always say no unless hey get written permission from my boss who always says no too. Kids put everything on he vlp/vle (call it what you will).

 

Carl

[Daleus]

How much printing does your school do?

 

too bloomin' much.

[Quackers]

School same size as yours, just under 500 students, since september we have done (according to pcounter)

 

Colour 65,751 sheets

Mono 204,462 sheets

 

So 270, 213 sheets in total...

[sidewinder]

I could probably find an accurate number but I may as well summarise with: LOADS

[localzuk]

I'm betting you don't include your copier count in that maniac.

 

Including our 2 copiers, our total is 384452 pages since September (not including the Riso, which would add a further 80000). Roughly 19000 of that is colour pages.

 

A total of 5663 pages are from pupils. And if I remove the copiers, the total is 51290.

 

School is 605 kids.

[fafster]

We've printed out 41,320 pages since starting back in September. We're using Print Limit Pro and have set up a 90-second rule. Someone can't print the same document without waiting 90 seconds. It prevents the click-happy lot who get impatient when their document doesn't appear from the printer straight away. That alone has probably halved the number of pages that get printed.

[maniac]

Hi Mike,

 

Can i ask how you collated the stats?

 

Have you used a Print Management solution?

 

Only reason I am asking is that I already know we spend alot each month on toner and ink, but looking at where we can reduce costs (especially in the current economic climate).

 

I'm running papercut NG print management software, which is excellent and very good value for money as well.

 

If you're just interested in monitoring your printing, you can download their free print logger from here PaperCut - Print Logger - a free print job logger for Windows.

 

Mike.

[maniac]

I'm betting you don't include your copier count in that maniac.

 

You'd be correct, as I don't manage the copiers they are managed by our reprographics person, I'm only responsible for printing. I dred to think what our copying is like, but that's good because part of the reason for print management was to encourage the use of the copiers as they are cheaper to run than most of our printers.

 

Mike.

[localzuk]

You'd be correct, as I don't manage the copiers they are managed by our reprographics person, I'm only responsible for printing. I dred to think what our copying is like, but that's good because part of the reason for print management was to encourage the use of the copiers as they are cheaper to run than most of our printers.

 

Mike.

 

Yeah, we run PaperCut MF here which integrates with our 2 Ricoh copiers, so I get the whole number for the school. (I also end up managing the copier contracts too).

[bossman]

@all:

 

We go through 200,000 sheets of A4 per year and that is just in the ICT suites, the rest of the school printers get through another 100,000 from printers and another 350.000 photocopying.

 

Awful lot for a medium sized school

[mjs_mjs]

Our HT has done 4K since September i think on his own.

 

We have Pcounter but don't use it regularly.

[enjay]

Not sure you'll ever get a single number representative of acceptable printing, as every school defines the word acceptable in a different way. Instead, I would suggest you look at how your printers/copiers are being used, and see if you can identify areas for saving. Look for:

* printers being used instead of photocopiers

* people proof-reading their print-outs, i.e. the same document being printed a couple of minutes apart

* unclaimed pages on the printers

* people printing all when they just needed page 1 (almost impossible to spot, mind you)

 

Alternatively, ask around the teaching staff as to how much printed material the students are required to produce for their subject, then set the print quotas to be that (or maybe 10% less to encourage efficiency!).

 

See if you can actually watch what comes out of one of the printers, either by working near it during a lesson or using some print management software to clone the jobs to another printer.

[rad]

Too much, don't know how many pages we print but do know we spend far too much on toners.

 

We really should get a networked photocopier but people can't get off their chairs, thats too much effort!

[maniac]

Not sure you'll ever get a single number representative of acceptable printing, as every school defines the word acceptable in a different way.

 

I'm not really after that, I was more curious to see how we compared to other schools, as I've never run print management properly at any of the other schools I 've worked at.

 

A lot of the suggestions you've made are actually things we already do. There's a copy limit of 3 copies on printing, any more than that and staff should be photocopying. There's department printing budgets set at 1000 pages per department per term apart from Business and Enterprise who get double. Staff are also quotad, the only people who aren't are the admin team, LRC and Senior teachers, although they still have the 3 copies restriction apart from our admissions officer and exams officer who both do mailmerges. Also there's a 60 second restriction, print the same document within 60 seconds and it gets rejected by the print queue. I also have a documentxx blocked so students have to save their work in word before they print.

 

I'm very surprised by the figures coming from some people, absolutely astounding amount of printing some schools do!

 

Yeah, we run PaperCut MF here which integrates with our 2 Ricoh copiers, so I get the whole number for the school. (I also end up managing the copier contracts too).

 

I looked into this, but we have Toshiba and Konica Minolta copiers, which Papercut doesn't integrate into easily, it was going to cost too much so we've left the photocopying out of it for now. When our contract comes up for renewal we will look at getting copiers which allow this system to integrate easily and manage the copiers using papercut as well.

 

Mike.

Edited January 25, 2010 by maniac

[3s-gtech]

We've done 140,000 (including admin) pages in 9 months, reduced massively since I put Papercut NG on the system. We were getting through 4000 yield toners in a week in some rooms before.

[Soulfish]

Since September when PaperCut started monitoring networked printers we've printed roughly 150,000 pages. Not including the photocopiers! From that staff have printed 96,000 pages

 

Still haven't got around to setting up PaperCut to log all of the stand alone printers.

[Guest Guest]

Just putting in Pcounter now so cant tell you the number of prints, but i can tell you how many copies a single photocopier has done since we put it in 7 days ago; 19,000!!

 

I believe the total number for a year is somewhere around the 750,000 mark.

 

1100 place school

[SpuffMonkey]

We did 260,000 pages last quarter - mostly by staff.

 

Its my contention that the only way to get staff to be responsible is to make them responsible by charging the costs back to their departments - but SLT won't wear it here - for some reason...

[rayfleming]

I did a small sample survey of some schools I know before Christmas (getting ready for my cost-saving session at BETT) and it seemed that over a million copies isn't unusual for a secondary school, including both the printer and reprographics.

 

The easiest way people find to get the answers was to persuade somebody in the office to add it up from the stationery orders/invoices. That'll give you a good overall figure to go from. Then you can work out what goes through your printers, and what goes through reprographics.

 

Typically reprographics is 1/6 of the cost of classroom laser printing, so by doing this work, there's a way of going back to the SLT and suggesting how you can save them money.

 

Sadly, because in some schools it's regarded as "somebody else's budget", it doesn't get looked it holistically, but there's nothing it being done.

 

Many schools are spending more on paper & photocopying/printing than on the their ICT - but there's tons of ways the ICT systems should be reducing the amount of paper used up.

 

Just realising, 1,000,000 copies over 1,000 students is 1,000 sheets a student a year! That makes it seem even bigger

[jlucas]

We're on about 90,000 prints since July last year (when we installed PaperCutNG). That also includes admin but not the photocopiers in repro.

 

James

[Hawkeyez]

I have been asked to attend a meeting tomorrow about printing costs etc...

So did a quick report on PCount... since Sept '09, 85542 (staff room alone is nearly 10k!)

 

Been trying to get the school to change the funding for prinitng for ages, as the IT dept is paying for 2/3 of it.

 

Gary

[enjay]

Sadly, because in some schools it's regarded as "somebody else's budget", it doesn't get looked it holistically, but there's nothing it being done.

 

That's part of the problem here - photocopiers are admin's responsibility, printers are IT's. Just to confuse matters further, paper is bought centrally by admin, whether for printers or copiers. We havae recently started taking a more "top down" view of things though.

[IrritableTech]

Since September our school (roughly 1300 students & 130 staff) has done a total of 211,249 sheets. Once again we're using Papercut to manage printing.