Printoscope Cost Control

Printouts under control

Every company produces lots of printouts. Some of them are redundant. They include documents which could exist only in electronic version, as well as printouts which are the result of employees’ overuse. The employees’ awareness that they are controlled reduces printouts volume by about 30%.

Purposes

Printoscope is an advanced network solution designed to monitor the quantity and cost of printouts produced by local and network printing devices. The program allows you to calculate and manage all printouts created on local and network printing devices. The initial effect of the analysis of data collected in the system is the optimization of printing costs. Printoscope facilitates the management of printers and multifunction devices by providing a series of reports about users, printers and locations.

Detailed settlement of costs

Printoscope system collects all information about documents that are printed in the company. Administrator defines the cost of making a color and a black and white printout and the cost of paper to be used during printing for all printing devices. At the stage of Printoscope system configuration the administrator maps company’s organizational structure and assigns employees according to it. As a result, Printoscope enables to specify the costs generated by a given organizational unit. For companies which operate a system of cost settlement these data can be used to charge a given organizational unit. By contrast, in companies not engaged in such records it enables the head of the cell to control these costs. Printoscope also provides information about employees who generate costs different from the average, allowing to detect a potential fraud in the company.

Limits and monitoring

Individuals and departments may have set monthly printouts limits. There are two limiting models, Soft Limits – if the limit is exceeded by an employee, the Printoscope automatically informs the employee and his supervisor, and Hard Limits – if the limit is exceeded by an employee, the function of printing and copying is blocked for him/her. This mechanism allows an accurate planning of the printing costs for the entire company.

Monitoring of devices

Printoscope provides information about printers that are overloaded, underloaded or generating the highest costs, which allows the optimization of printing costs generated by a given device. In addition, it allows better planning of supplies purchasing.

Obtaining information directly from network devices

Obtaining information about the status of multifunction devices is one of the functionalities of the Printoscope Cost Control module. It is performed by the SNMP scanner. It allows to search the network for devices that can communicate by means of SNMP. The SNMP scanner can also monitor the status of selected network devices, read the contents of counters (printouts, copies, faxes, scans, etc.) stored by the device as well as automatically and periodically register device counters in the database.

Cooperation with SAP

Printoscope Cost Control allows you to monitor the printouts from the SAP R/3. This functionality is controlled by the agent module for MS Windows, which communicates with the SAP R/3 server in order to retrieve the information about the actual names of users and printed documents. This solution has been successfully tested in the applicable SAP Poland laboratory.

Remote installation and update

It is possible to run the administrative module, the reporting module and the limits editor module from any workstation using the Java Web Start technology. The individual modules are launched from a web browser. This model of console modules distribution allows an easy installation and upgrade of individual components.

Projects Management

The functionality of projects management consists in defining the projects and assigning settlement accounts to them. Projects enable grouping the costs for employees from various organizational units of the company. Each project has a unique name and may have a specific start and end dates and the PID number which is equivalent to the name of the project. The PID number is used to assign the task to be performed on MFD device (copies) to specific projects. The user, at the moment of printout, specifies under which project the printout should be calculated.

Cooperation with Printoscope Printouts Repository module

Printoscope Management Console is an interface of the Printoscope Printouts Repository module which enables to view the content of documents.

The console also manages the authorization to individual documents.

Identification of users by Printoscope Desktop Authorization

Thanks to Printoscope Desktop Authorization (PDA) the Printoscope system enables the users identification in environments where there is no domain controller and the uniqueness of logins is not provided. PDA allows you to organize the printing environment, gives unambiguous identification of the printing user and ensures an appropriate classification of costs.

Features of the Printoscope Cost Control module:

Functionality

• Monitoring of printouts created on the LAN networks supported by MS Windows both on workstations and print servers
• Monitoring of printouts supported by the printout queuing system and the NDPS system in the Novell NetWare 4, 5 and 6 networks
• Monitoring of printouts from the CUPS and LP printing systems (for systems of the UNIX, Linux, Solaris and AIX families)
• Monitoring of devices connected to the computer directly or by a network
• Possibility to define any number of printing templates
• Possibility to create or import the company’s organizational structure and synchronize it with an external system (typically ADS, NDS, LDAP, OpenLDAP)
• Defining the named user accounts with the possibility of assigning any number of system accounts to them
• Advanced management of print drivers – possibility to deactivate or change the assignment to a printer
• Support of printouts and copies attributes: number of pages, paper size, type of printing (color / mono), print mode (simplex / duplex) and print resolution
• Advanced control of paper feeders (the possibility of assigning any type of paper to the indicated feeder)
• Advanced data filtering system
• Limits for users and organizational units – e-mail based events registration system
• The costs of paper and printout, including support for double-sided print mode (duplex)
• The agent’s work control on the users workstations
• The use of multiple drivers for each printer
• Possibility to check the statistics for unassigned controllers
• Obtaining information from network devices via SNMP
• Cooperation with the SAP system for the collection of the user names and printed documents
• Remote installation and update of the module consoles through the mechanism of the Java Web Start
• Possibility to assign actions to specific projects
• Communication between the MS Windows Agent and the server is encrypted (via SSL)
• Possibility to select your preferred database (PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server)
• Possibility to export user data (logins, card number, pin) to the Printoscope Terminal Server module
• Cooperation with Printoscope Terminal Server module enables the operation of multifunction devices (calculating the cost of created copies)

Administration

• Easy installation and administration
• Users data import from other systems
• Multilingualism (available versions: English, German and Polish)
• Defining system operators and their authorization
• Defining passwords powers for system operators

Reporting

• Data export to other programs (html, csv, pdf, xls)
• More than 60 reports about users, printers, limits, etc.
• Intuitive reporting mechanism based on the wizard
• Some reports available in graphic form
• Possibility to prepare reports for a given period