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The volume of printing that occurs in an office can be surprising. One of the easiest ways to cut down unnecessary costs, as well as paper wastage, is to ensure users print only what they need. uniFLOW Online helps administrators take complete control of printing, copying and scanning activities.
Organisations such as legal firms, financial institutions, real estate agencies and the education sector still rely heavily on paper documents to be able to operate effectively.
For these sorts of organisations, it’s important not only to have visibility on print costs but to also be able to allocate costs to individual users, devices and departments.
uniFLOW Online’s detailed reports enable you to see printing activity down to the user and device level across your entire organisation. With ULM-enabled Canon devices, job logs are collated (using Common Peripheral Controlling Architecture) and sent to the uniFLOW Online portal to compile insightful and actionable reports.
The first step to cut down unnecessary costs is gaining visibility of those costs. Cost centres, also known as billing codes or cases, allow print, scan or copy charges to be allocated to different projects or cases. They can be assigned on a per-job basis or by default according to user, device or location. Following identification, additional copies or scans made on the device can also be allocated to the correct user, department and device. Allocation of costs can highlight expenditure by users and pinpoint areas where costs can be scaled down.
Using the accounting widget, the administrator can easily review their print volumes by colour, or black and white. This structured overview of the organisation's print and scan habits gives you the ability to reduce costs, and streamline print processes.
In the education sector, where students and teachers must pay for their printing and copying, it is important to correctly track transactions and available funds. Budgets are the perfect way to limit print and copy activities. If a budget is exceeded, printing/copying can be stopped altogether and users notified that funds have run out. Budgets can be enabled or disabled for individual users, groups and locations only.
UniFLOW’s hybrid technology is bridging the gap to the future by combining two technologies – cloud and on-site servers. The power of local servers is used where needed, while connecting to cloud locations quickly and effortlessly, profiting from its scalability without the need to add additional servers. Organisations can decide whether to move costly servers to the cloud over time to reduce maintenance work and IT costs on maintaining servers.
A simple review of the numbers demonstrates that effective print management can save an organisation up to 40%.
Pharos - How to Reduce Office Printing Costs
Cost centres, also known as billing codes or cases, allow print, scan or copy charges to be allocated to different projects or cases.
Quickly check information such as print volumes and compare black/white print volumes against colour print volumes.
The uniFLOW Online portal contains graphical reports on user details, device details and summary, sampling by department and many more.
Primary and secondary wallets permit to distinguish top-ups made by an organisation or school, and top-ups made by students or employees.
After logging into the device, users see their remaining budget at the top of their print queue. uniFLOW Online calculates which jobs can be printed with the remaining budget and will reject any job(s) that exceed the budget. All costs incurred are deducted from a user's budget.
Jobs might be cancelled due to technical issues such as paper jams. Cancelled print or copy jobs will automatically be refunded and shown in a relevant transaction entry.
UniFLOW Online has once again impressed in the 2024 Buyers Lab Pick Awards, winning for the sixth consecutive year as an Outstanding Cloud Output Management Platform. Keypoint Intelligence recognised its powerful scanning functions, secure printing capabilities, and mobile/email printing functionalities. Users can easily scan documents to various cloud destinations such as Google Drive, Microsoft Teams and OneDrive for Business, and benefit from automatic background image processing options. The special text-block OCR option enables quick document filing by scanning batches of repetitive documents.
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Through its reporting feature, uniFLOW enables comprehensive monitoring of print activity at every level, providing IT personnel with clear visibility into who is printing what, when, and with what frequency. This feature creates valuable opportunities for optimising print resources, reducing environmental impact, and driving cost savings.
uniFLOW Online budget management feature is an ideal solution for the education sector and local government agencies seeking to exercise greater control over their printing environment. On top of helping users stay up to date with their print budget, this feature offers several key benefits, including cost reduction and minimising environmental waste.
This system distinguishes between primary and secondary wallets, enabling easy differentiation between top-ups made by an organisation or school, and those made by students or employees. The total available budget, which a user can utilise for printing or copying, is derived from the combined funds of both wallets. When printing or copying, the primary wallet is the first to be charged for costs. Once the primary wallet has insufficient funds or is depleted, the secondary wallet is automatically accessed for further transactions.
Organisations can still retain their on-site server at head office to handle complex or customised document workflows e.g. scan to a local DMS system, fine-tuning workflows using the uniFLOW Workflow Engine or specific customisations to cater for specific business processes. In addition, satellite or temporary offices can be moved to the cloud to benefit from a lean and easy to manage IT infrastructure. The flexibility and convenience of this combination is why the hybrid solution has become the dominant IT infrastructure model for most large businesses. By connecting uniFLOW to uniFLOW Online it means all business locations, including cloud and server, are managed centrally.
