As part of your leadership role in IT, you are tasked with monitoring your processes and evaluating them on an ongoing basis to see where inefficiencies may have cropped up. You also must keep up with the latest in industry best practices, in particular as to how they will save your enterprise organization money and time.
In addition, for many organizations that are looking to “go green” and save energy while reducing operational costs , it makes sense to examine how you are handling internal printing jobs for your employees.
After all, with so many consumables to consider, including toner and paper and the electricity required to keep the system running, any savings you can make here could lead to a significant impact on your company’s bottom line. There are also time savings that you should keep in mind, since standing around at the printer station looking for your job is a major waste of employee resources.
With that in mind, it’s worth exploring what a print spool is, the nature of print spool management and how state-of-the-art print spooling software can save you on printing costs today.
What is a Print Spool?
When you are the only person in your office using a printer, you don’t need to be concerned with sharing this resource with fellow coworkers. But having a private printer in a large organization can be seen as a money-wasting perk, with more companies preferring instead to deploy multiple printers in one or more central location for all workers to share.
The word “spool” in print spool management is an acronym for “simultaneous peripheral operations on-line.” A print spool involves relegating various incoming print jobs from different employees and storing them in the print buffer, which is a section of memory designated for upcoming pages to be printed.
It makes sense to use a print spool because the various devices (desktop printers, laptops, tablets, smartphones) will typically have different data transfer rates. You don’t want to hold up an important print job from one person’s computer because pages are dripping from a slower device used by someone else, for example.
The print spool buffer stores each print job in memory and then outputs them when the information is ready. Memos, contracts, white papers and other documents are output according to their place in the queue.
What is Print Spool Management?
Left to its own devices, a printer will accept jobs as they come, with large jobs containing intricate and dense graphics from one department potentially edging out a smaller but more important single-page document that an entire team is patiently waiting for so they can start their meeting.
Consequently, IT will install print spool management software to gain better control over both the computational work and the printing process itself. By establishing priorities, you can print what you need most urgently first, even if it wasn’t necessarily sent to the printer first.
Consider the work done by your payroll department as it cuts check each month. Payroll batching cannot deviate from schedule, or you risk making late payments and upsetting your team. Calculating the payroll checks doesn’t take very long for the computer to finish, but if the printer had to wait for each calculation to be made before it printed checks individually, everything would grind to a halt. You can free up payroll computers by batching their paycheck output with print spool management and then let payroll use their computers to turn to other pressing calculations. In the next chapter we will see how print spooling software and print spool management tie together in saving your print operation costs.
How Can Print Spooling Software Save Printing Costs?
Print spooling software is designed to bring you efficiency and curb the costs associated with typical print jobs. One aspect of printing costs that managers sometimes forget to take into account is the work people have to do once their jobs have been output.
Particularly in a larger enterprise office setting, if you don’t provide an easy way for employees to locate their documents in the printer tray, you can wind up with clumps of people standing around the printing station, trying to sort out which report is whose. This is why IT will want to configure their print spooling software to include a banner page, also referred to as a printer separator, in between each job. This sheet identifies the document and who printed it so workers will be able to gather their papers more quickly and can get back to their desks.
Print spooling software does more than adjust the order of various print jobs. You can also use it for other time and money-saving efforts. Not all documents need to be full-resolution, so this means you can get away with using a lot less toner, such as on first drafts of memos.
Uniformity of printing jobs is easier when you tie it all together with print spooling software. For example, using one print driver for all printers in the network enables you to swap out a malfunctioning computer with ease, leading to less delays and interruptions for the end users.
Let’s say a manager has just sent a large job to the printer, but then immediately realized that her assistant had already printed a copy the day before and left it on the desk. Without print spooling software, the manager wouldn’t be able to easily cancel the job. But if you delete it from the queue before output, you wind up saving money on paper and toner.
Clearly there are number of advantages that come from deploying a new print spool management system, based on a sophisticated print spooling software, at your facility. Every bit of savings and efficiency in printing that you can bring to the table frees up resources to be used for other purposes, such as to hire more workers or invest in new technology to further streamline operations.
Whether you are a startup looking to provide the best printing options for your new workers in a brand new building or are an established company that has a mandate from stakeholders to control printing costs now by changing your setup, it pays to take advantage of print spooling software to save on resources ranging from paper and toner to electricity.
You may be also interested in reading these articles on print optimization software and print process optimization.
References:
- http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/spooling.html
- https://itstillworks.com/spooling-buffering-30372.html
André Klein
Freelance Consultant for DocPath