Is A Managed Print Services Program Right for My Organization?
Each day, office workers print an average of 34 pages. Over half of those will end up in the recycling bin at the end of the day. Further, a full ninety percent of North American companies don’t track what they spend on printing, much less what gets printed. To help with this, many organizations now use managed print services.
Managed print services (MPS) take a load off of businesses by providing and overseeing business document output. From providing critical hardware to implementing paper use reduction strategies, an MPS is a customized solution to increase organization, tracking, and savings.
Want to know how much you’re printing? Are you interested in reducing office printing costs? Here are three signs that a managed print service might be right for you.
1. You have unexpected printing or IT-related expenses.
An MPS eliminates unexpected print expenses by bringing to bear experience with handling all possible contingencies. Office technology is often finicky. Press one wrong combination of buttons and error codes lock down the entire system for hours. Use the wrong toner cartridge, and it leaves smudges all over important documents. That’s if the device prints at all.
Unexpected expenses come in all shapes and forms. These may include:
- Unforeseen visits to Kinko’s because the office printer can’t handle a job
- Unexpected specialty supplies or accessories
- Increased payroll expenses from employees staying late to fix things
- Maintenance
- Underestimated supply costs
- Cheap or defective equipment breaking down
- Unexpected licenses or subscriptions
- Print-related storage
Unexpected expenses occur in the absence of a robust printing infrastructure. Small businesses rarely see print production as a quintessential part of their core business operations.
By the same token, rapidly changing organization structure may make it difficult to invest in such a feature. Likewise, large organizations may struggle with convoluted structures which hamper efficiency.
Conversely, a managed print service cuts through both of these problems. It keeps documents in order, improving productivity and guaranteeing the presence of the right tools at the right times.
2. You’re spending money on print supplies that aren’t being used.
Office supplies take up space, aren’t great to look at, and often mysteriously disappear. They also end up requiring the purchase of shelves, folders or other organizational devices just to keep it all in check. Nonetheless, an office needs to keep on hand a dizzying array of supplies just to be able to meet all of its printing needs.
From invoices to memos, advertising material, and training documents, each task requires the accumulation of increasingly disparate items. Supplies end up sitting around when businesses:
- Buy in bulk to get the cheapest discount
- Buy the wrong supplies by accident
- Have no system in place to inventory current supplies
- Have poor organization and zero restrictions on who can access supplies
- Buy supplies for one-off projects which have no application elsewhere
With a managed print service, there’s no such thing as loose odds and ends with no obvious purpose or over-purchasing to get discounts. Since an MPS is likely to have all possible supplies on hand, usage gets metered. A business pays for exactly what it uses.
3. You have no idea how much your printing is costing you.
The physical printing of a document only counts for 22 percent of the entire printing cost. Where do the other 78 cents per dollar go? Nine out of ten business owners won’t be able to say. Research suggests it’s between one and three percent of a business’s revenue.
For a business with net revenue of $1,000,000, that can approach $30,000 annually. That’s $82 per day or roughly the cost of one entry-level employee.
The IDC white paper found that managed print services reduce the cost of printing for companies by about 20 to 30 percent. For that business with a one-million-dollar revenue, that’s saving between upwards of $9,000 per year. Part of this occurs because using an MPS cuts down on a business’s device fleet and eliminates the need to stash extra supplies.
However, a second major advantage of an MPS is that by tracking printing usage, it can also help a business identify where they can cut down. An MPS takes the printing out of the office, but it makes crystal clear exactly how much a business is printing.
Left to their own devices, the average employee burns through one tree per year with those 34 pages daily. With an MPS, only the pages that need printing will actually get printed.
Do you need managed print services?
A managed print service makes sense for small and medium-sized businesses which require robust printing capabilities but may have neither the budget nor the infrastructure to do so. If you’re struggling from chaos and unknowns in your business printing environment, an MPS can bring critical calm and order.
An MPS improves efficiency and productivity by streamlining the printing process. It eliminates the need for costly investments which may or may not prove useful down the road.
By bringing this service on board, a business can focus on its more critical operations while professionals take over the printing.
The first step towards controlling hyperinflated print costs is performing an accurate print assessment. Have our team conduct an assessment at your office today!
