Printer management involves coordinating the usage of office printers and multifunctional devices across your organization. A managed services provider can start by assessing your existing equipment and workflows before offering suggestions like hardware and software upgrades or relocation.
You can track the cost of individual print items with a single client platform, enabling you to allocate expenses by users, cost centers, or billing codes. This helps you control your costs and improve efficiency.
1. Save Money
Print management solutions have a number of hidden capabilities that can reduce overhead for admin and service desk members and boost user productivity. This includes reducing costs for printing, enabling secure printing, and simplifying document workflows. These capabilities are especially important for businesses and government agencies in high-stakes industries like healthcare, education, and law enforcement, where security is paramount.
Streamlining workflows can also reduce the amount of paper that is used and help reduce waste in an organization. This can have a positive impact on the environment, as well as the company’s bottom line.
Many people don’t consider the cost of printing when calculating their business expenses. However, the truth is that it can be a significant expense for many organizations. For example, some organizations have reported that their printing costs make up to 20 percent of their overall operational expenditures.
A great way to reduce waste and save money is by enforcing printing policies that limit or discourage unnecessary printing. This can be done by using print quotas, limiting color printing, or encouraging double-sided prints. It’s also helpful to implement warning triggers that alert users of the cost of their print jobs. This helps to cut down on waste and prevent employees from submitting large, expensive print jobs without checking the price first.
Another way to save money and improve customer service is by leveraging remote troubleshooting tools that can resolve issues before they are escalated to the service desk. This enables technicians to spend less time on reactive support and more time working with end-users to resolve any problems. This can help companies and organizations reduce the need for costly repairs or replacements of hardware, software, or toner.
2. Reduce Waste
Print management is often overlooked as a way to improve operations and streamline workflows. In reality, it’s a critical component of a business’s success that can save both money and time.
In addition to saving money through cost-per-page controls and paper conservation, reducing waste can be an added benefit of streamlining printing. Employees can get into bad habits like printing multiple copies of the same document, or they may simply not realize how much paper they’re using when they submit a job. Changing this behavior requires both education and reinforcement, which can be accomplished through Print Management tools.
For example, a secure pull printing* feature that requires a PIN to release prints can help to cut down on over-printing. Additionally, organizations can implement warning triggers that alert employees when a print job is incredibly large and could be more expensive than necessary. This allows employees to take a second look at their printed documents and re-think their choices.
Educating employees about the benefits of printing to PDF rather than hard copy can also reduce waste and use less energy. Often, the need for hard copies can be eliminated completely by using these technologies.
Another way to reduce wasted printing is by improving customer service. The ability to send notifications or scripts to printers in the case of an error or outage can help eliminate unnecessary calls to technical support and resolve issues more quickly.
The best print management services are able to customize their approach for the individual needs of each organization. This helps to ensure that the changes made are beneficial and will have the highest return on investment for the company or agency. In addition, these solutions should be able to seamlessly integrate into the IT environment for immediate and continuous benefits.
3. Increase Efficiency
Using print management to centralize all printing operations makes it much easier for the whole company to work together, especially when employees are working remotely. Having the ability to send print jobs from desktops, laptops, and even mobile devices helps increase productivity across your organization.
A strong printer system also offers security options to protect sensitive data. You can have users authenticate their identity to a device before they release their print job, protecting the information from prying eyes and reducing paper waste. In addition, many print management solutions offer secure printing from mobile devices.
With GDPR and other compliance regulations in place, you need to be sure that your business is handling confidential information responsibly. One of the easiest ways to fall out of compliance is to simply leave a printed document sitting in a printer tray for anyone to see. By introducing security features such as pin code printing, you can ensure that only those who are supposed to have access are the ones getting prints.
Another way to increase efficiency is by automating document workflows and eliminating manual processes. You can make it easy for end-users to order print items with personalized messages and branding and automate delivery to a specific location or person. This helps reduce the need for admin and help desk members to handle these requests, freeing up their time to focus on higher-value projects.
In addition, by offering a one-stop client platform with reporting and equipment monitoring, you can keep a close eye on your inventory levels to avoid running out of a critical item. With the ability to pull reports by budget codes, you can be proactively informed about when you need to order more supplies.
4. Increase Productivity
Streamlining printing workflows helps reduce the amount of time employees spend waiting for documents to print. It also eliminates unnecessary printing and lowers paper, ink, toner, and energy usage costs. It also enables businesses to track printing expenses by department or cost center for accurate budgeting and financial reporting. Working with a print management company that offers a one-stop client platform makes it easy for you to assign all printing orders to their appropriate cost centers at the time of ordering, saving your team valuable time and helping to increase productivity and accuracy in the office.
With advanced features, many print management solutions help companies automate the printing process, eliminating manual steps and increasing the speed of the workflow. They can also be configured to automatically route documents to the most appropriate printer, reducing delays and improving both the quality of the output and the efficiency of the print job. They can even be set to only print in black and white when the document isn’t needed in color, further reducing waste and saving money.
Print management solutions can also offer secure printing practices, protecting sensitive documents from being printed without authorization and preventing them from being seen by people who shouldn’t have access to them. They can also monitor your print environment for low toner levels and paper jams, allowing you to reduce downtime and keep employees productive.
With the right print management solution, you can save money, increase efficiency and productivity, improve customer service, and more. If you’re interested in transforming your business through advanced printing technology, contact us today for a free quote. Our expert print management consultants will work with you to develop a customized solution that fits your needs and budget.
5. Improve Customer Service
Print management is a big part of how business processes can be made more efficient, freeing up more time to focus on other tasks. But it can also help improve the overall customer experience, making sure that each job meets a high standard and reaches its desired outcome.
In the age of GDPR and new data protection laws, it is more important than ever to protect sensitive information. A simple oversight like leaving confidential documents sitting in the printer tray could potentially lead to a breach of security that could cost your company dearly. Using print management techniques like pin code printing can greatly reduce these risks, ensuring that the right people are handling the right documents at all times.
Having the ability to monitor printers remotely means that any issues can be addressed quickly and efficiently, so your team doesn’t waste time trying to figure out what went wrong. Plus, it’s great for employee morale to have a printer system that is stable and easy to use.
A good print management company will work alongside you to assess your current printing capabilities and make suggestions for improvement. Whether this is through hardware and software upgrades or simply relocating the printers, they can ensure that your printing capabilities are working at peak capacity.
The next step is to implement and integrate the solution. This is done by working closely with your IT department and seamlessly integrating the print management solution into your environment. The result is a more efficient printing solution that saves you money, improves productivity, and improves the overall customer experience.