If you employ the services of a great managed print services (MPS) partner, there’ll be a constant drive for improvement in your printing environment.

This becomes particularly important the more your business grows, because the services provided by an MPS partner need to come along for the ride if your print infrastructure is to remain capable of supporting the firm’s growth.

With cost reductions of more than 70% on offer for some organisations, constantly evaluating how to improve your managed print service is a vital business task.

Growth pains

When firms grow quickly, the printing environment can fast become outdated. Unfortunately, this prompts many businesses to simply invest in more devices, thus raising their capital expenditure and inadvertently creating a chaotic infrastructure that’s costly to manage.

Overheads will quickly spiral out of control and, ironically, that growing infrastructure will often struggle to handle the volume of print required.

Organic growth of this kind also typically leads to difficulties managing the fleet. Ordering consumables for different devices and arranging maintenance for countless printers becomes time consuming for the facilities team and takes them away from business-critical tasks.

Identifying and overcoming the challenges

There are typically three key challenges that every business will need to continually address in order to improve their managed print service:

• high print volumes;
• increasing costs; and
• unnecessary waste.

Streamlining the fleet is a great place to start. For instance, if you’ve somehow amassed thirty devices, there’s probably no reason you can’t reduce that to single figures.

While that might sound unworkable (you needed more printers to support a growing workforce, right?), with the right blend of multi-function devices, desktop machines and high quality graphic printers you can vastly reduce the amount of hardware needed to serve every employee.

Modern security features like ‘follow me printing’ will further reduce the device count by ensuring employees can retrieve prints securely from any device with a form of ID.

When it comes to consumables, your MPS partner should be closely involved in the order process, by using centralised print management to remotely monitor when ink is running low and identify any potential device issues before they become a problem for the business.

Less devices, lower carbon footprint and transparent bills

The results of a concerted effort to improve your managed print service will be far reaching.

Better user security features, fewer devices and centralised print management will enable teams to focus on business critical tasks, rather than having their progress hampered by a bloated printing environment.

The introduction of ENERGY STAR rated devices will also reduce power consumption considerably, and paper use will be equally less troublesome thanks to follow me printing. It’s not unusual to see over 70% reduction in the number of pages printed each quarter and a similarly colossal saving in service charges when an managed print service is at its best.

The final area of improvement rests with billing. If you’re tired of receiving multiple, confusing invoices from suppliers, a drive to improve your managed print service will result in a transparent, single bill for all document related costs.

Is your managed print service delivering on high quality, cost effective print produced by a manageable printer fleet?

If printing is causing your business serious headaches, it’s time to return to the drawing board.