Saving money on budgetary expenses is something that any business needs to stay competitive and keep profitability as high as possible. This applies especially when cost savings can be achieved without biting into the quality of product or service that customers receive. There are many ways to pull this off, but one of the more surprisingly effective ones involves switching to managed print services (MPS).
What Are Managed Print Services?
Quite simply, with managed print services, you allow a professional external IT service to monitor your in-house printing operations at all times and detect misuse or unnecessary printing. Managed print services can watch over all aspects of your printing workflow. This means keeping a tab on things like toner levels, error reports, page counts, paper use and printer functionality.
An MPS provider can preventatively maintain your printers and related devices to reduce the need for time-consuming IT support operations between your own staff. Furthermore, MPS services can coordinate a more fine-tuned management of print resources in ways that find and reduce hard-to-spot waste. If you’re dealing with overprinting of redundant documents, or use of printing resources by staff for their non-work needs, managed print services can fight down both sources of waste.
All of these things are watched over in real time and quality MPS providers can also deliver regular and highly detailed reports on what they monitor. This documented reporting will give you an overview of how your printing operations are working in terms of waste, efficiency and assorted problems. These allow your company to cut costs or set up MPS management so that it red-flags specific cost-increasing activities by employees or the machinery itself.
How Printing Costs Can Cost You
The losses that poorly controlled printing can create for your business may be surprisingly large. A study published by Convergence Consulting estimated that as much as 3% of a company’s annual revenue goes to printing expenses alone. This can be even higher if hidden costs are factored in. The same study also showed that an average white collar employee might print as many as 10,000 pages per year.
A significant percentage of those 10,000 pages will not be for necessary work-related text or graphics. Just how significant? According to one waste recycling firm, nearly 50% of all documents printed by a business in one day are thrown away by the end of that same day.
If you take into account that printer ink costs about $12,000 per gallon and is considered more expensive by weight than things like Beluga caviar and human blood, then cutting back on those 10,000 ink-covered pages per year, per employee becomes a significant cost cutback.
Then there are the less obvious costs of inefficient in-house print service management. One major example: A relatively recent study by Gartner estimated that as much as 50% of employee complaints to their company’s IT Help Desk were related to printing issues. This means that valuable and often expensive professional IT staffers were forced to spend half their time fixing problems that could have been wholly avoided with MPS.
How MPS Saves you Money
Managed print services can reduce all of the above by carefully monitoring how, when and for what your printers are being used. MPS can also tell you how well all your related devices are performing. By doing this and regularly reporting on it based on the parameters you set, companies like Great Lakes Computer can cut down waste enormously for a better bottom line. Our managed print services even includes maintenance of machinery and toner delivery for further savings on printing expenses.
