Increasing the efficiency of the printer fleet, a print management strategy - is it necessary?

Question

Seal

Good afternoon, colleagues.
Wanted to ask the community for advice. Recently, my superiors "rewarded" me with the responsibility of purchasing and repairing equipment for the warehouse of the IT department, in which I work as an administrator. And a lot of questions began to arise regarding printing technology: justification for repairs, replacement of spare parts, refilling cartridges, etc. Most often, questions arise in the financial control department.
The fleet of printers cannot be called huge, about 40 units, and in addition to specific machines (Epson L800 and LX300 +, Panasonic KX-FLB883 and HP color), the basis is Kyocera and HP of different series. The question arose of collecting statistics and calculating the efficiency of this fleet to justify repairs and replacements. Accounting for the life cycle of cartridges and printers has not yet been conducted. There is no centralized management of printers today (perhaps it will be after the transition to AD). The authorities do not want to allocate money for existing ready-made solutions, because the initiative comes from me, and not from them.
The company that services this entire park cannot provide any statistics on efficiency.
And now the question in the studio. Has anyone had to solve problems to increase the efficiency of the printing press fleet or develop a strategy for using them? Where to start, what tools can be used? And do they even make sense in such studies with such a size of the park?
PS On the advice of colleagues, I started collecting invoices as paper statistics and am looking for ways to collect statistics from the devices themselves. But one question remained unlit - the repair of the printers themselves. How long (and at a cost) is it worth dragging the oldies, squeezing out the last drops of toner? Or is it solved only empirically for each model?

Answer 1

It was like that at the time. about 30 network printers (from small things to hp 9050dn). The management was interested in the cost of cartridges, the number of pages per month, as well as how much the load increases during the reporting periods.
What I did:
I wrote a python script that snmp took this data and stored it in a file. Then another 1 script displayed the average data, and then made a report to the authorities with ruffles and other things.
Then I used the data capture script as a reminder of the low level of toner on the printers of the authorities.

Answer 2

I'll subscribe to a good question :)
Network HP has built-in reports that can be requested via HTTP (either without authorization at all, or with a known password). As an option, write a simple script that collects statistics from printers and try to analyze the data: search for the most loaded ones, view cartridge resources, calculate the cost of printing, etc.

Answer 3

What could be the performance increase?
Well, as much as the accountant needs, so much he will print, why would he need more.
The issue of financial monitoring is usually decided by the financial director, whose signature is usually on the invoice for payment, his signature from it and all the answers, do accountants need to repair the printer or they can live without a printer.

Answer 4

Great question. At one time, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to assemble this thing (print counter) and then how to analyze the number of refills and keep records of how many sheets were printed specifically with this cartridge.
Who cares We collect user printing statistics
As a tool for analysis, we used the 1C configuration, but if you wish, you can probably do this in any software.