By West McDonald

One of my favourite guys to talk with at Print Audit is Paul Giorgi, one of our Customer Success Managers.  If you are a Premier member you already know Paul very well.  He works with our Premier members to assist them in their MPS sales efforts using the rich cache of Print Audit toolsets, including Print Audit 6.

I asked Paul about how much user data we’re actually gathering:  “Print Audit 6 is deployed at millions of customers around the world. I have data from as far back as 2009 and as recent as June 2014.  We have data on close to a billion documents.”

Paul on why user data is so important. “Device data only paints half the picture. User data is absolutely key, to be able to benchmark where an organization is and where you can take them can only be done with user data.”

Paul gathered some information for me from 21 end-user assessments using the Assessor toolset(raw data set available for download at the end of this article). These studies covered a lot of different verticals and touched a lot of pages:

Data Background: 

• Depth: 21 end-user assessments
• Users: 13,000
• Workstations: 9,659
• Vertical Coverage: Mix of Education, Financial, Government, Legal & Medical
• Annual Volumes: 78,618,000 total
• Annual Colour: 18% total volume, or 14,151,240 pages

Applying User-metrics Collected from Print Audit 6:

• Average customer values: 3,743,714/year
• Web/Email print: 25% of annual colour or 3,537,812 colour pages/year
• Daily print: 24 pages/user/day
• Average pages/job: 4

Digging Deeper:

The beauty of having data from 21 assessments is the ability to break things up into verticals.  I’ve been doing assessments with “device data” for over 6 years and I thought I knew a thing or two.  But once I applied “user metrics” I found out how little I really understood.

SHOCKER #1:  Government Employees Printing TWICE as Much as Average Joe!

Ever go fishing with a pro?  They know exactly where to go and the kind of bait to use depending on the weather.  If you want to catch big pages, look here:

• Government:  Highest per/user printing.  One institution was observed at 53 pages per user per day.  That’s twice the average.
• Medical: Just shy of 51 pages per/user/day.  That’s a lot of prescriptions!

Surprisingly some of the lowest per-user printing happens in Education, with only 14 pages per user per day.  I guess all those tiny smart phones are making a big dent.

SHOCKER #2:  Your Bank is Printing 4X More from the WWW than from Excel!

Wow!  I didn’t expect this and wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see the data with my own eyes. I am shocked and amazed at the amount of Internet printing in verticals you might not expect. Look who’s printing tons from the Web:

• Financial: Internet printing accounts for over 60% of total volumes, most of it from Internet Explorer!  Web printing exceeds Excel printing by 400%!
• Education: Students don’t print very much, but what they do print is mostly from the Internet.

SHOCKER #3:  Almost Zero Duplex!

Ever have a customer say “we don’t need duplex rules, we set the defaults on the printers?”  The facts tell a different story:

• Education & Finance: Both were nearly “zero” on the duplex counts.  Looks like they could use some education on how to save money on paper!
• Medical: Hospitals duplex rates are only .14%.  I guess when you’re saving lives, the back side of the page doesn’t count for much.  Largest percentage of printing comes from Adobe & Excel BUT mostly monochrome.

So What are the Opportunities? 

If you are chasing “net new” business there is nothing like offering them savings to get their attention.   You could help save an average account over $30,000/year by doing the following:

Colour Conversion:

• The average customer is printing 25% of their color volumes from e-mail and Internet browsers.
• That is 178,272 pages you could convert to monochrome for a customer savings of over $16,000 per year (assuming colour rate of .009/page)!  A great way to close a net-new account.

Duplex Rules:

• The average customer is printing 3,743,714 pages per year, and as we’ve seen above, almost ALL of it in Simplex.
•  If paper costs .0075/page, increasing duplex rates to 50% would save a customer over $14,000/year.

If you are reading this and thinking “yeah, but I would NEVER introduce rules to my existing customers, I would only lose revenue” then you aren’t a Premier member.  Print Audit Premiermembers know that they can decrease existing customer costs while still increasing overall account profitability.  Get in touch with Print Audit today to find out how you can too!

Want to see the facts for yourself?