The humble office printer. It hums along in the corner, dutifully churning out documents, invoices, and the occasional cat meme. But beneath its unassuming exterior lies a potentially monstrous cost center. Unmanaged printing can eat away at your bottom line, devouring toner cartridges, wasting paper, and zapping employee productivity. And what’s more, most organizations don’t know how much they’re spending on office printing. This is where a managed print services strategy can help!
Many times, organizations not only overlook their unmanaged office printing, but they also overlook the fact that their print infrastructure is a golden opportunity to optimize operations and reduce business costs. By partnering with a managed print services provider to implement an effective managed print services strategy, organizations can optimize their print fleet (printers, copiers, MFPs; you name it), streamline efficiency and ultimately reduce their costs around print spend. Let’s take a look at how a managed print services provider, like Parmetech, can bring real benefits to your business through implementing a managed print services strategy.
What is Managed Print Services?
Before we begin discussing our approach to implementing a managed print services strategy, first let’s quickly review what managed print services are. Oftentimes, people think managed print services is way more complicated than what it actually is. Simply put, managed print services is a comprehensive approach to managing an organization’s print environment. It involves assessing, optimizing, and managing the entire print infrastructure, including devices, consumables, and workflows. The goal is to enhance productivity, reduce printing costs, and minimize the environmental impact of printing.
Parmetech’s Managed Print Services Strategy Process
As a local managed print services provider, Parmetech has been partnering with our customers to create a custom managed print services strategy that’s right for the unique needs of your organization! Our managed print services strategy follows a four-step process:
1. Assess
No solution can be properly designed without a true understanding of the environment. Our forensic print assessment process uses qualitative and quantitative data collection methods to help us understand your people, processes, business needs and goals. This includes:
- Mapping your printing devices: Identify all printers, copiers, and multifunction machines across your organization.
- Analyzing print volume and habits: Track printing patterns to understand usage peaks and identify potential wasteful practices.
- Calculating printing costs: Unmask the true cost of your printing infrastructure, including toner, drums, other consumables, and service/maintenance of the printer.
2. Design
We use of decades of expertise to design a technology strategy based on the context of your environment that will allow you to achieve both your short-term and long-term goals. This includes:
- Right-sizing and optimizing the printer fleet: We help you determine the best product mix for your environment including the number and types of printing devices based on our print assessment.
- We also optimize device placement to ensure convenient access for users while minimizing energy consumption.
- This phase also includes implementing any print policies to control access and usage such as user authentication, secure printing, and more.
3. Implement
Once we’ve completed the design phase, it’s time unleash the MPS magic! Implementation typically involves:
- Installing the printer fleet: Based on the product mix we designed in the optimization phase, we roll out implementing your new printer fleet which includes removing unnecessary devices and replacing outdated ones.
- Software installation: If we’ve determined some sort of print management software is necessary to help monitor/control print policies, this will be rolled out as well.
- Training and Education: We’ll get all users spun up on how to use the device(s) so there is no down-time. We will also educate users about the new print policies and procedures, and promote awareness of responsible printing practices to reduce unnecessary waste.
Effective implementation requires ongoing monitoring and adjustments. That’s why we manage and support your organization through the entirety of the project, utilizing change management best practices to ensure a smooth transition and maximized results.
4. Manage
Once implementation has been completed that is just the beginning. We provide a dedicated account manager to continuously monitor, review, and optimize performance for your organization! We’ll ensure that everything related to your MPS printing is streamlined including supplies delivery, support, repair, and billing.
Which Types of Businesses Can Benefit from Managed Print Services?
Through managed print services you can gain true visibility into the processes and costs associated with printing. Oftentimes, people hear managed print services and think ‘I only have one printer I don’t need that’ or ‘we don’t print that much in our organization’ or ‘it’s cheaper to just buy my printer supplies from Office Depot or Staples’. However, this is not the case. Whether you have one printer, one hundred printers, or more, every organization can benefit from MPS. With a successful managed print services strategy in place, you can expect to enjoy a bounty of benefits, including:
- Reduced printing costs: Studies show MPS can save businesses up to 30% on printing expenses.
- Increased productivity: Free employees from printer woes and allow them to focus on core tasks.
- Improved efficiency: Streamlined workflows and automated processes result in faster and more efficient document handling.
- Enhanced security: MPS solutions often include data encryption and access control features.
- Improved environmental sustainability: Reduce paper waste and energy consumption through optimized printing practices.
Take the Next Step in Your MPS Journey with Parmetech
When you’re ready to explore implementing a managed print services strategy into your organization, it’s important to choose the right managed print services provider with the expertise, experience and portfolio that aligns with your organization’s goals.
Whether you are completely new to managed print services or have been taking advantage of MPS for years (but maybe aren’t so happy with your current provider), let us help you take your printing management to the next level. We can manage brand new or existing equipment, and our capabilities span across some of the top print manufacturers including Xerox, Kyocera, HP, Lexmark and Brother.
Whether you’re looking for something very basic or an all-inclusive program, our print supplies and service MPS offerings are completely customizable to your needs and will help you take more control of your print spend. We have a demonstrated track record of helping our customers reduce operating costs, improve efficiencies, maximize data security and support sustainability efforts. Let us help you get started!
Give us a call at (800) 727-6383, email us at info@parmetech.com.
