Patent ID: 8488150

Claim:
An apparatus for analyzing usage of printers, comprising: at least one computing device, including: a print information mining unit for obtaining from at least one printer information about a plurality of print tasks performed by each printer, wherein the information about print tasks at least contains information of print requesters, print document attributes, and print time of each of the print tasks, the information of each print requestor including a requestor identifier (ID) of the print requestor; an organizational representation generating unit for transforming the information about print tasks into an organizational representation, wherein the transforming includes associating the information about print tasks with information of an organizational structure containing the print requesters, wherein the information of the organizational structure comprises a tree structure including a plurality of nodes, wherein each node of the tree structure represents an organizational unit in the organizational structure; wherein the transforming further includes: associating each print requestor with at least one of the organizational unit nodes in the organizational structure using the requestor ID of the print requestor; and obtaining and consolidating the information about print tasks for the print requestors associated with each of the organizational unit nodes in the organizational structure to generate the organizational representation; and a policy optimizing unit for: comparing the consolidated information of each organizational unit with at least one predefined metric, and identifying, in response to the comparing, organizational units that exceed the at least one predefined metric.