Business Tech For All

Over the past 6 months the murmur regarding managed print services has been getting louder.  And now it has become an all out scream.  This has fallen directly in line with the current business mantra of “do more, repurpose employees, save money and do it NOW”.  While there are a number of partners now in this game, Xerox seems to have taken the lead and is growing fast.

During the early part of this decade the term “paperless” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue .  Now people have realized that paper will never go away entirely. In fact, new 2009 estimates say that an average worker will be responsible for 3,000-15,000 pages per year.  Michael Scott’s commercial on The Office, might be more spot on than the joke it was initially supposed to be “Limitless paper in a paperless world.”  In the current paperless world, companies are responsible for hundreds of thousands of pages per year and the current strategy is failing miserably.

Problems with the current printing landscape:

- Companies purchase and roll out far too many printers for an environment.  The band-aid quick fix clogs the system and results in overconsumption of toners and excess use of IT staff to manage.

- Printers account for 25-30% of help desk calls. 

- Typical IT staffs do not have printer technicians.  They usually have IT generalists who end up learning as they go.  This is a poor allocation of IT staff since they are spending excessive time figuring out printer issues instead of using their IT knowledge for company driven initiatives.

- Lack of control over spending.  Printer consumables are not consistently ordered, IT staff spend countless paid hours working with printers, when a printer line ends the company is stuck with the remaining supplies. 

Now here are some ways that managed print services can alleviate these problems:

- strategically placed print units that maximize user productivity and usually decrease the number of units in the environment.

- Cost control.  Managed print services work on a cost-per-print basis, so total monthly usage can become budgeted as a business decision and not as an ad-hoc purchase.  Hourly employees will not need to spend time servicing units or ordering product.

- IT staffs can become more efficient by spending their time in skill specific IT initiatives and plans without the interruption of help desk calls for product in which they have no training.

The fix for all of these ailments is pretty simple.  A managed print service partner will work with you to get a reading on your print volume and types of prints.  The partner will then use this data to give you a larger 30,000ft overview of your print environment and projections.  Typically this includes reallocation of print resources so you can optimize the printers and multi-function units you already own.  If you see the benefit, you can then partner with the managed print service partner to handle your print needs.  Outsourcing desktop printing services takes the uncontrolled spending and usage of printers and ropes it into a manageable and easily budgeted process.