Cutting Printing Costs

[bossman]

Printer costs whole school 30 laserjets - 10 colour, 20 mono, 750 pupils, 70 staff members = £3500 per year.

 

Now also looking at whole school reprographics at 5p pp including toner and maintenance this would make it possible to cut down on printing off the laser jets and we would be able to give each dept its own code therefore charging them per page usage.

 

We could also enforce smaller print jobs to promote the using of the reprographics on the network.

[SOSAGES]

Hello all,

 

one of my google alerts sent this link to me and i thought i would say hello.

 

One of the many jobs i have to do is to test printer/copy monitoring software.

 

I saw the discussion about papercut and i would say it is one of the top products i have used over the years and it now has the option to monitor copies.

 

The interesting thing about charging for print/copy jobs is i have not seen 1 bit of software that will fit in at every site and working out what is best for the site is the fun part.

 

oh and then the hardware comes into play monitoring copies is even more fun

 

as for charging for copies, i know alot of sites that do not do it simply because they never thought of it. These days students dont mind paying for copies and for generating some money its a very nice earner, some sites happily make a nice profit from charging.

[ZeroHour]

Firstly welcome SOSAGES,

We are looking at papercut also here so any issues you have would be good.

[SOSAGES]

it would depend on what u want it to do.... The papercut lads seem to work hard and its a nice product, also they are very open to suggestions on how to make the software better i have had a few chats with them in the past and they were very helpful.

 

But with so many software products to choose from its a headache. I wouldnt pick one product over them all it would all depend on your setup and what you want to achive, do you want to charge for copies? what OS are you running? if you want hardware what if any cards do you have (mifare/barcode/etc) ? and a million other questions

[phillipmillward]

Hi all,

 

i am considering going for a cost per copy solution. I have been working with a company who will supply us with Gell printers which give an excellent quality print. The charges after you have purchased the printer are in the region of 0.05p per black print and 4p per colour print.

 

Phil

[projector1]

using the printer settings web management we have set the priter to

econ mode

reduced the resolution to 600

and set the density to 2

 

we did this a while back and will be comparing costings against the previous years results.

[localzuk]

phillipmillward -> We have a cost per print copy solution for our main 'centralised' printer. It is with Canon and we pay roughly those prices. However, even though the prices seem good, the reliability of the machine leaves much to be desired. Whatever you do, don't go for centralised printing!

[phillipmillward]

Localzuk --> yeah i have a few friends who have cannon printers who have also had problems, so rest assured that i wont be going for thoses

 

Thanks

 

Phil

[SOSAGES]

i think u can always find someone who has issues with X.

 

i wouldnt worry about it.

 

Personally Ricoh all the way

[john]

Personally Ricoh all the way

Ricoh, (vomits) No Thanks, Toshiba all the way more like, I have been there done that with Ricoh and the quality of the kit and print out is no way near that of a Toshiba.

[SOSAGES]

^^ see..

 

u cant please everyone.

 

i have had issues with toshiba kit in the past but mostly its good stuff, the same can be said for most makes.

 

i wouldnt worry about it like i said u always meet someone who has had a bad time with X company its not often someone posts something postive

[Ravening_Wolf]

At my previous establishment I was using RM Auditor and then bodging around with it's SQL database, SIMS and a second database to hold all of the merged data. I could then bill departments for each and every job sent. It took quite a bit of hacking to get running but once it did the colour printing costs dropped right off.

 

I'm looking to do something similar here but RM Auditor only runs on CC3; does anyone know how to dump server logs direct (and automatically) into SQL Server?