Every Friday, someone on your team opens a spreadsheet and starts matching numbers: what the MIS says was printed, what the paper store says was used, what the schedule said should have run. It takes an afternoon, sometimes longer. Nobody put it on the org chart. It just became someone's job.
That spreadsheet feels like control. It's actually where your waste has been hiding all along.
The hours spent reconciling are the visible cost. The invisible one is bigger: every number in that spreadsheet is already a day, sometimes a week, out of date by the time anyone reads it. Decisions get made on last week's picture of paper consumption, not this run's.
Research from Pingale and Altay (2025), validated using data from BCCL/Times of India, found that a 1% reduction in print waste can improve margin by up to 34%. That's the kind of number reconciliation spreadsheets can never catch in time to act on, because by the time the mismatch surfaces, the run that caused it is already finished.
It's not a process failure. It's a systems failure. When your MIS, your scheduling tool and your paper tracking live in three separate places, someone has to be the connective tissue between them. That job usually falls to whoever noticed the gap first, and it stays theirs by default.
The spreadsheet is a symptom. The disconnected systems underneath it are the disease.
The fix isn't a better spreadsheet template. It's removing the reconciliation step entirely, by having paper consumption, scheduling and billing report from the same source of truth in real time. Print 365 is built around exactly that: paper tracking, edition planning, press scheduling, insert management and post calculation running as one connected system, so there's nothing left to reconcile because nothing drifted apart to begin with.
We wrote more about what that looks like in practice, and the 9% average waste reduction operations report once they connect their stack, in how top print operations are reporting 9% less waste.
Because their MIS, scheduling and paper tracking systems don't share data automatically. Someone has to manually match numbers across tools to catch discrepancies, which turns a system gap into a recurring manual task.
According to Pingale and Altay (2025), validated with data from BCCL/Times of India, a 1% reduction in print waste can improve margin by up to 34%. Waste reduction has an outsized effect on margin because paper and material costs are one of the largest line items in print production.
A connected Print MIS that has paper consumption, scheduling, billing and post calculation reporting from a single source of truth in real time, so there's no separate data set left to manually reconcile.
Alliance Insights, PRINTING United Alliance; Pingale & Altay (2025), validated at BCCL/Times of India.