Has this situation ever happened to you?
You send a large document, maybe a series of invoices or sensitive employee information to one of your many network printers. Knowing that it is a large document, you give it a little time. Maybe you grab a coffee on the way to the printer. Maybe you stop and have a quick chat with a coworker. One thing leads to another, and you completely forget about those dozens of pages, sitting warm and abandoned on the printer tray, and you head back to your desk, paperless and carefree.
Another common occurrence with networked printers is that you accidently send the print job to a different printer, maybe on another floor or in a different department, and instead of searching for the lost print job, you simply resend it to the correct printer. What you didn’t realize is that a visitor, deliveryman, contractor, or disgruntled employee has just snatched up your valuable document and sold it to a competitor for top dollar, which inevitably will leave your company in financial and reputational ruin. For your poor judgment, you will probably lose your job, be forced to move in with your mother-in-law and have to get a job as a barista where you will dish out coffee and donuts to people who know how to properly care for their important print jobs.
For many organizations, waste from documents, left uncollected at the printer, can equate to 30% of all printing causing concern for revenue margins.
-Ringdale, Provider of FollowMe Printing
While this is an extreme case, it is important to note that in these scenarios, two bad things are happening. One, company resources such as toner and paper have been wasted, and two, sensitive information may be sitting unattended and open to wandering eyes and sticky fingers.
As the face of IT continues to change, companies of all sizes have begun implementing secure, or follow, printing solutions that allow employees to send a print job, and then pick it up from any network printer by using a secure access code or an external device, such as a smartcard or security key fob. These solutions, also known as ‘pull printing,’ eliminate wasted resources in the form of abandoned print jobs, and also ensure that sensitive information is not left alone, since the document will not print until the user has ‘activated’ it right at the printer.
Secure printing also affords companies with a wealth of statistics that can aide in important business decisions. Now, companies can easily see the volume in which users and departments are printing. With this new found information and the reduction of wasted materials, secure printing can help organizations reduce printer related costs by up to 60%.
So, unless you want to keep destroying the environment as you burn precious trees to the ground in the form of forsaken glossy stock paper, consider a smarter printing solution. Less resources, more secure, and you won’t have to move in with your mother-in-law.
This blog was not intended on hurting the feelings of the good men and women currently employed as baristas, or to insult your mother-in-law.
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