The Critical Role of Services in Managed Print Program

Your printers have an important role to play in your organization’s digital transformation. Hence, it’s time to rethink the way your print environment is managed.

Business owners are becoming increasingly familiar with the premise behind managed print services. However, as the popularity of these programs grows, it becomes more and more important to understand what services an effective Managed Print Services (MPS) program should include. By doing this activity, businesses can be rest assured that they won’t entrust their print management to a provider that offers an incomplete program.

Today’s intelligent multifunction printers have a huge role to play in digital transformation. They make your people more productive, your processes more efficient and your data more secure.

Let’s examine in this article what are the necessary services and tools that a print service provider should include in order to make sure you are getting the right support from your partner.

The Definitions of Managed Print Services (MPS) are varied, but the result is simple and clear. You gain visibility and control over your printer, which will help you to save money and improve productivity in your business. Moreover, Managed Print Services software helps to increase security during the handling of your documents and data and reduces environmental impacts. This is not all. We automatically delivery the right materials at the right time and in a timely manner. Our software checks your printers several times a day to see what consumables will be needed soon.

Did you know – assuming your business is similar to most companies – that 1% to 3% of your annual revenue is used to create documents? When your printer fleet isn’t managed it might cost even more. Most businesses have no idea what the money is really used for. Therefore, Managed Print Services are so important to many businesses.

With the right Managed Print Services concept, you gain control over your printers and printing costs, and enjoy many more benefits. With MPS, you reduce your paper usage and lower your energy consumption, which adds to protect the environment. And if you and your MPS providers do not stop at the printers, copiers and MFP systems per se, but include the work processes of your employees in the optimization consideration, then you gain significant productivity gains, and add an increased level of security to your documents and data.

Several MPS software solutions help to break down the cost to you, to protect the confidentiality of documents, to allow you to print at any time, to route print jobs where it makes economic sense via the optimum printers, archive documents that are quickly found again, or enable predefined work-flows to be edited and optimized.

Managed Print Services lower your costs, manage your documents, from creation to archival, and ensures added security.

A well-managed MPS program will provide your organization with the following benefits:

Cost Savings

You gain visibility and control over your printing environment.

For your Budgets

• Reduce the costs of toner, ink and other consumables
• Reduce paper and power consumption
• You can save on storing toner and ink for yourself

For your Employees

• Increase the productivity of your employees
• You lower requests on the helpdesk staff
• You reduce the workload on your purchasing department

For your Security

You employ security for the information in your documents

For Everyone

You protect our environment

Let’s examine some of the key elements that needs to covered by a Managed Print Service provider to ensure the smooth running of your operations –

A Simplified Purchasing Process

Inside the average office space right now, there are probably printers, copiers, fax machines or MFPs from various vendors. On top of managing supplies and maintenance for different devices, there is the cost of paying invoices to different providers of those supplies and repair services that might specialize in devices from different manufacturers.

With a Managed Print program, businesses enjoy a streamlined purchasing process and a one-stop-shop for printer fleet management.

Usage Monitoring

An MPS program uses the results of a print audit to help identify potential cost-saving opportunities in your print environment and balance out the print volume per device in an office, which extends the print life of equipment.

After implementation, your usage will be monitored by your provider. This information allows your MPS provider to point out ongoing cost-saving opportunities, as well as make adjustments to your program. In this monitoring, toner usage is tracked, so supply replacement can be automated. Your replacement toner cartridges will arrive at your office shortly before your existing cartridges are empty.

Equipment Maintenance or Replacement

Maintenance, parts repair and equipment replacement all have a significant impact on the effectiveness of employees and the efficiency of operations throughout the company. When a printer goes down for maintenance or needs a part replaced, there is a cost associated with its downtime. The longer that downtime drags on, the greater the cost of the lost operation time.

If a printer or other MFP device needs to be replaced, you have to deal with decreased printer functionality and lower productivity levels. There is also the cost of a capital expenditure to purchase new equipment.

Managed print providers should offer support from certified technicians as part of any managed print program. When printers go down, the program covers the cost of travel time for a technician, on-site maintenance, repair and even the cost of replacement parts or full equipment replacement as a result of normal use.

Helpdesk Support

Even with the greatest installation and maintenance support available, a reliable Managed Print Services program needs to offer help desk support to assist when end user questions or frustrations arise. A managed print provider’s program offers support during normal business hours to address issues of functionality and performance.

High Standards & Security

Hacks and breaches aren’t always because of hackers or cyberattacks; it can be something as simple as leaving a sheet in a printer tray. As multifunction printers become more intelligent and complex, they’re increasingly at risk of security breaches – both from outside and inside sources.

These new threats make it all the more important to look for an MPS provider that can deliver high standards of security.

The basics for a secure MPS infrastructure include intrusion prevention, device detection, and document and data protection. But the best providers also offer additional layers of protection through user analytics and fraud deterrent technology.

Insights that Drive Continuous Optimization

A Managed Print Services solution is all about extracting the maximum value from your print environment. Your MPS provider will be generating and collecting huge amounts of operational data from your networked printers — and the insights from that data provide a unique opportunity to streamline your infrastructure and workflows.

Your MPS provider can generate reports on metrics like:

• Which printers are used the most, and when?
• How quickly paper, ink and toner are being used?
• Which processes are the most paper-intensive?
• How effective the supply chain for paper, ink and toner is?

The more you know about your printers and how they are used, the bigger the opportunity for optimization. For example, if you know which print processes use the most paper, you can look at digitising them for better efficiency — and lower costs.

The Right Tools for the Job

Your MPS provider needs to offer a comprehensive suite of tools that covers printers, supplies, and service management.

As a basic starting point, your potential MPS provider should offer:

• Third-party service management and integration
• Help desk management
• Options to integrate with client-based ticketing systems
• Monitoring and management of supplies
• Transaction logging and auditing
• Escalation logging and resolution

Visibility When You Need It

Though your MPS provider handles the bulk of your print infrastructure management, from time to time your team will need to get more hands-on. That requires an MPS solution that gives you an operational view of how your print environment is performing — and where it could improve.

Some MPS providers offer a portal where information from your environment is consolidated into an easy-to-navigate dashboard, giving you full visibility of all your connected printers.

Some of the pointers can be:

• Visuals to show printer locations and status at a glance
• Links to reporting systems
• Access to incident reports, supplies orders, driver installation and other services
• Easy access to manuals and other information for your printers. Remember, an MPS portal should make it easier to monitor supplies, incident management, and usage data – all of which can help you optimize your print environment

If your organization is still managing its own imaging and printing infrastructure, it’s time to ask yourself some tough questions.

• Do you have the dedicated resources and expertise needed to capitalize on the types of improvements possible?
• Is your infrastructure living up to its full information management potential?
• Are your new technology purchases driving down overall cost or adding to the confusion?
• Do you foresee being able to meet your security and environmental goals any time in the near future?
• Have you targeted key paper intensive processes for improvement?

UTAX and Al Reyami Technologies, with its expertise built over close to two decades can help you answer these questions with more accuracy, process the implications and prepare for the future.

Together, we can develop a printing strategy that takes your printing infrastructure where it needs to be so that you can focus and invest in your business and your customers.

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