Coordinated Business Systems Blog

Avoiding Expensive Color Mistakes

Written by Kirk Studebaker // President | Apr 13, 2022 5:40:55 PM

When users make a mistake printing it can cost an organization thousands of dollars on a single occurrence.  Just because a document looks to be black and white doesn’t always mean it is.  Things like clip art or images in documents that have commands for processing black, or all the colors mixed together to produce black can lead to pages being charged as color without even getting the benefit of color. In addition, on many printers, once one page is printed as color, every page after is treated the same.

This does not have to be the case.  

Minimize Printing Costs

One way to minimize the cost of mistakes is putting a tiered color program in place. This brings the cost of low coverage color documents, which most of your “accidental color” prints are, into a low-cost category.  As much as 1/3rd the cost of a traditional color print. 

The advantage to this is there is no training, no end-user disruption, and no need for software to change behavior. It's seamless.  The downside is it doesn’t completely solve the problem. It reduces the cost of the error and in most cases, this is enough to save your organization money and reduce overall printing cost. 

In the cases where this doesn't solve the problem, there are different levels of action that can be taken.

Your company can:

  1. Install a monochrome driver that will not allow color prints to be made and deploy this driver to your users that don’t require color.  Now they can’t make a mistake. 
  2. Install the tiered color meter once the machine is in place to support the tiered color.  This gives users the ability to access what level each page of a print job will be charged at easily before printing multiple pages.  
  3. Install Print Management Software that gives you the ability to excerpt higher levels of control over output in your organization as well as build inefficiencies.  

There are many ways to address color output, control of color output, and the abuse of color output. The first step is an analysis and that’s what Coordinated Business Systems does.

If you have an interest in engaging, I promise you won’t be stalked by a sales rep with commission breath.  We focus on identifying client issues, identifying viable and affordable solutions and that is what results in sales.  

To speak with our team to learn about the potential savings you could see, contact us here