In an office setting, productivity is important to the business’s bottom line, and you can’t afford to have bottlenecks in your daily operations. Unfortunately, the office printer can often become one of those bottlenecks. If several people need the printer at once, you may end up with a line of employees standing by the printer and waiting for their jobs to be done rather than attending to their other tasks. How can you prevent this from happening? Keep reading to get some tips.
Consider Smaller Printers for Each Department
While it’s beneficial to have a large business printer with extra features and functionality for the whole office to use when needed, you don’t necessarily need a large piece of office equipment to perform basic print jobs. If your office printer is frequently backed up with a long queue of print orders, you can minimize this issue by giving each department its own smaller printer. Employees can print out forms or scan and make copies of documents within their department instead of lining up at the communal copy machine. It’s beneficial to your productivity, and employees will appreciate easier access to the equipment they need.
Limit Print Order Sizes
Often, it’s one large project that backs up all the print orders for the office. If you have one employee who needs to print 50 copies of a 10-page booklet, the printer will be working on that job for quite a while. This gets frustrating to other employees who are simply waiting for a single-page contract to print for a client and can lead to those unproductive bottlenecks.
Consider limiting the maximum number of pages that an employee can print at once so you can avoid these situations. For example, the employee in the example above could print ten copies of the booklet. This is still a pretty large order (100 pages, to be exact), but it will significantly reduce the wait time of anyone with print orders behind them. Have the employee assemble the ten printed packets, then print ten more, and until all necessary copies are completed. By spacing out the print orders into smaller batches, you’ll allow other employees to quickly get the papers they need.
Consider Print and Copy Speed
If your printer is old and outdated, its print and copy speed may lag behind modern models. Of course, the machine itself may be at least partially responsible for the bottleneck. Today’s business copiers in Fairbanks, AK, can put out copies much more quickly, cutting down on wait times at the printer and allowing employees to get back to work sooner.
