Saving Print Costs in Education

Over the past 5 years, there have been cuts in funding across the public sector, in order to aid the government’s quest to reduce the deficit and grow the economy. One sector that has particularly suffered over that time is education, where cuts in funding mean that students are being deprived of vital services and materials to aid their learning. To counter this there are ways of reclaiming and saving costs in other areas, to help soften the impact of the cuts. Saving print costs in education is easier than you might think and with an estimated £115m of print wasted in the sector every year, they are measures that are well worth encouraging.

The most important innovation to print is the implementation of print management software. A recent Lexmark survey found that in the education sector less than 30% of institutions used print management solutions to monitor and allocate their spend. Simply knowing what you are spending can help you cut costs, plus there are the time-saving aspects that come through optimising your practices. This allows your teachers to get back where they belong; in the classroom and teaching children.

What we often find at EBM when we are looking to cut costs for the education facilities we work with is that the latest technological advances have been embraced, but are simply not being utilised efficiently. By using print management solutions, you are able to ensure quicker printing that incorporates all devices used in the classroom, from mobiles and PCs, to digital whiteboards. Managed solutions bring convenience to your practices, but also enable you to have a clear overview of your usage and regulate the costs of scanning and printing.

The demand for print is obviously massive in education, both from teachers and students. An effective Multifunction Printer (MFP) can bring efficiency to this system, with scanning of materials and the ability to email documents and save them to a USB all means of reducing the amount that it is vital to print. You can digitally record data too, making life far easier for administrators in charge of printing budgets.

What the education sector needs to get away from is an over reliance on paper, and educate both the pupils who are frivolous and the faculty who have yet to adapt. There are an estimated 1,000 sheets of paper used for each pupil every year. When you consider there are 24,000 schools across the UK with 8 million pupils, the problem really hits home. There is currently more spent on print in schools than on IT, a scary ratio when you consider we live in a digital age.

Considering all of these options can and will reduce print costs for an educational facility. Enforcing double sided paper and reusing already printed one-sided sheets are other small changes that can make a huge difference. But to get a full understanding of exactly what can be done to make serious reductions in print costs, what you need is a Free Print Audit from EBM. This allows us to find out exactly what you current expenditure is and highlight ways that we can reduce those costs.

The overpriced cost of office equipment, excessive waste of paper and ink, and underuse of vital management software all go towards ensuring that institutions spend around £200,000 every 5 year period on their printing. By changing the way you think, and speaking to EBM about what solutions are available, you can reduce these costs and stop depriving children of vital materials at the expense of print.