A pallet of paper for printing per month is a lot of money.
Some quick math for context. One ream of paper is 500 sheets. It costs approximately $8.50 USD. Doesn’t sound like a lot, does it? Let’s continue the equation… One pallet is 300 reams of paper. That’s 150,000 sheets of paper. That’s $2,550 (USD) per pallet of paper. If you were to buy one pallet of paper a month for your printing, your annual paper order adds up to $30,600!
That’s how much Pittsburgh Technical College was spending on their printing. But that’s just paper. There are ink, toner, and electricity costs on top of that. It’s expensive, wasteful, and just unnecessary.
“We literally went through a pallet of paper per month,” says Jon Buhagiar, Director of Network Operations at Pittsburgh Technical College.
How do you control that amount of waste? With a print solution. Pittsburgh Technical College managed it with PaperCut MF.
How do you spend that much on printing?
Let’s rewind to 2010, before Pittsburgh Technical College found its print solution. The Pennsylvania non-profit institution, founded in 1946, is home to over 1,400 students and more than 250 faculty and staff. And they had no control or oversight over their printing infrastructure. Students could print any volume of documents in various formats, resulting in substantial financial losses due to excessive ink, toner, and paper consumption. Additionally, the absence of a print management solution meant that there were no defined limits on printing activities.
Jon tells of how limitless PTC’s printing was: “We had a closet, basically, with a whole bunch of printers and all the printing for the college went down to this closet; this was our print center. Printing got so out of control that we actually cut a hole in the closet and had to roll down a steel shutter. There was no control. If you wanted to print a book, well, you’d print a book.”
Jon sums up how these costs got out of hand: “Color prints and color copies are super expensive because you’re using multiple toners. Then, of course, black and white in bulk, that adds up too. We had people printing everything that they wanted in color, and it was like literally emails, everything. And then we had the black and whites just out of control and people were printing books of course material.”
Faced with their mounting costs, lack of control, and security concerns, PTC’s CIO William Showers recognized that their printing service needed some fixing. He and Jon sought a print solution that would streamline their print operations, improve visibility, and promote cost savings.
PaperCut MF slashes paper pallet order down to a pallet a year
PaperCut MF provides the necessary tools to regain control, monitor print activities, and achieves cost savings. With their newfound visibility, PTC accurately measures and assesses the extent of their print waste.
Jon explains: “Before PaperCut, the only way that we were able to see anything was a budget line or pulling logs that took us a lot of time. Now it’s just click, click, click, and we have a report as to how many copies or prints a printer has put out."
Armed with this information, PTC was able to take effective measures to curb wasteful printing habits, resulting in a substantial reduction in their monthly $2,500 paper bill: “We’re down to maybe a pallet of paper every 6 to 8 months,” says Jon.
Not only is this saving money, but it helps Jon and his team sleep a little better at night: “We’re saving trees, right? Pre-pandemic, we had higher numbers on our copiers. And this is one of the things, like, without PaperCut, we wouldn’t be able to see that utilization. Now, we can actually run a report and say, ‘Hey, we were doing 10,000 prints on this one printer. Post-pandemic, we’re only doing 5000.”
Beyond these cost and waste savings, PaperCut MF’s additional features Mobility Print and Print Deploy address security concerns and simplify the printing experience for users. “PaperCut is responsible for getting the right drivers on the machine and getting the right settings on the machine,” says Jon. “Mobility Print is a lifesaver just for the fact that everybody’s an admin of their own machine.”
Print Deploy helped Pittsburgh Technical College respond to PrintNightmare: “Print Deploy was an integral strategy in our security,” says Jon. “It helped us tremendously mitigate some of the risks in just Windows Point and Print.”
Thoughtful, secure, cost-effective, and controlled printing
How do you reduce your paper order from $30,000 a year to $2,500 a year? Pittsburgh Technical College did it with PaperCut MF. Not only have they completely slashed their paper usage down to only a couple thousand dollars a year, they’ve provided a secure user-friendly experience with full visibility and control. Jon sums up the key benefits of PaperCut as: “Cost savings, the security of Mobility Print and Print Deploy, and then reporting.”
