You’ve identified that you are potentially pouring money down the drain when it comes to your printing, be it documents, labels, or any other ink to paper medium. You can’t just tell everyone to reduce what they print. You need a plan. Here is step one.
Assess Your Current Print Environment.
From BizTechMagazine.com:
The first step for better print management is typically an audit of the current environment by an MPS provider. These findings can help identify redundant or underutilized printers that an organization can easily replace with workgroup printers and MFPs.
“You tend to find when you walk into an unmanaged environment that there are hundreds of assets for printing, but they are often heavily underutilized,” says Andrew Morrison, senior vice president of MPS business at Xerox, a manufacturer of printers and an MPS provider.
Many MPS providers jumpstart assessments by using software agents to scour the network for printing and imaging hardware and to gather usage profiles for each unit. The best services augment this data with information gained by a physical walk-through of the organization to locate devices that aren’t attached to the network but are still draining the budget for consumables, power and maintenance services.
“Cost-centered data analytics help end users truly understand what they are spending on print,” Morrison says. “Then, organizations can make decisions about how to find efficiencies.”
An optimization plan should determine what legacy equipment should be refreshed with faster ppm models to eliminate queues that spring up while staff members wait for large print jobs to finish. In many cases, organizations can save money by decommissioning stand-alone units in favor of more efficient workgroup devices.
The services provider may also help clients craft printing policies that promote efficiencies and cut costs. For example, setting MFPs for two-sided duplex printing will save on paper costs. In addition, a printing policy may designate which individuals or departments are authorized to use color printers to keep these expenses to a minimum.
Great Lakes Computer Corporation is a managed print provider. We offer a free print cost assessment to help you identify what your current print function looks like in terms of productivity and wasted resources. We can tell you if our Managed Print Program is the right fit for you and what you could potentially save. Contact us today to try it out.
