By Scott Hornbuckle; Senior Manager, Consulting & Information Services, Photizo Group

A typical managed print service engagement involves determining the cost of the current environment, optimizing the fleet on an ongoing basis to reduce the cost and then optimizing business processes and document workflow to increase efficiency for the client. However, determining the cost of printing and optimizing the fleet focuses primarily on the device side of the equation. Focusing on the user side offers additional savings.

GreenPrint, a private company headquartered in Portland, Oregon and founded in 2005, created a suite of solutions that do just this. It tracks what users send to the print queue and aids them in selecting the most appropriate printing device to gain additional savings. The solution allows users to create PDFs of documents instead of printing them, leading to even greater savings.

GreenPrint’s solutions consist of three components: Analytics, Advisor and preView+. Analytics is the foundation of the solution; all data from user’s print jobs is sent to a hosted server for Analytics, where the data can be analyzed to identify cost saving opportunities, such as users sending large color jobs to costly, local inkjet printers. Analytics gives administrators the ability to see who is printing, what application they are printing from and what devices they are printing to. This data gives administrators the necessary information to make informed decisions. Analytics can operate as a stand-alone product or can be combined with their other offerings, Advisor and preView+.

GreenPrint gave Photizo the opportunity to take a first look at Advisor and preView+. Advisor interacts with users to help them make decisions on the best device to use. This is accomplished by utilizing easy-to-understand green, yellow and red color codes for each printer, as shown below. Printers are labeled green, yellow or red depending on their cost, green being the best option.

These labels are completely flexible. For instance, MPS providers can list the most expensive printers as red, the cheaper printers that have the best margin for the provider could be labeled as green and others could be yellow. This is only one scenario, there are many other scenarios that would dictate which printers are what color. The administrative side of Advisor provides the ability to customize to fit a wide range of needs.

When a user prints a document to a green printer, Advisor does not appear. This allows users to use good print behavior without being bothered with a message. This setting can be changed to show Advisor every time, but the default setting enables providers to save money without unnecessary messages. When a user prints to a yellow or red device, the user is presented with the window shown in Figure 1. This window allows users to do the following:

  • Print to the green (recommended) printer
  • Chose to print with the printer currently selected
  • Print to a PDF file
  • Cancel the job
  • Go to preView+

The preView+ solution works directly with Advisor and it allows users to alter a document, convert it to mono/color, choose which printer to use or convert the document into a PDF file. Figure 2 is a sample PowerPoint document. Users can edit the document by removing pages, removing images or removing text from slides. This is a very handy tool for editing a file before sending it to clients. One can remove unnecessary slides, create a PDF of the file and send it.

The color-coding from Advisor is carried over into preView+, as shown in Figure 2. This feature allows the user to easily choose which printer they should use. Overall, the preView+ interface is intuitive and includes standard print screen options, in addition to GreenPrint features such as duplex, number of copies and mono/color options.

From an administrative standpoint, printer costs can be set from a single point. Administrators have the ability to choose how strict the system is with regard to setting the pricing and color codes. Administrators can let users update these as they desire or set them so that the administrator settings are forced down to client machines daily. Administrators have the ability to see all of the savings and printing costs in Analytics.

As a first look, Photizo finds this solution to be a great value-add. It allows companies to quickly realize cost savings without implementing print policies and rules. End users are informed of the best device options and can easily follow printing best practices without being hindered in their daily activities. Additionally, users can use Advisor and preView+ to create PDFs. This improves user workflow when removing pages from a document and saves companies money if they have not purchased a PDF creator, such as Adobe Acrobat. Advisor is currently still in beta testing and a new version of preView+ that is fully integrated with Advisor will be coming in 2012. Photizo looks forward to testing these solutions in greater detail in Q1 2012.

As senior manager, consulting and information products for Photizo Group, Scott Hornbuckle is responsible for providing proactive research and analysis, and collaborating with the consulting team to develop value-adding insights. He is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Accounting as well as a Bachelors of Business Administration degree in Finance.