How Print Costs Become More Manageable
Managed print solutions provide answers for several problems that can occur when companies choose to manage their own print services. Outsourcing all print-related responsibilities to an MPS provider leads to increase in efficiency, reduced administrative burdens, and reduced print costs.
MPS helps organizations optimize operations for maximum efficiency, print higher quality documents each time, and lower their managed print costs. The primary ways that MPS track printer usage and calculate costs involve remote management and print management software.
Remote Management & Print Management Software
Cost effective printing becomes possible when using an MPS provider. Even saving small amounts of materials relating to print costs can add up to major budget enhancements over the long-term.
Consider the fact that the average office worker might print 10,000 sheets of paper each year. Most desktop laser printers create an estimated 100 pounds of waste annually. And most print environments that are not managed have one printer for every three workers. All of this amounts to a lot of unnecessary trouble, waste, and expense.
One way that MPS lets you cut costs and reduce waste is by utilizing print management software like PaperCut. Print management software lets you enforce strict rules on who can print what and at what time. You even have the ability to show employees how many trees they are saving by not printing as much. With print management software, managed print costs become the norm.
To identify printer usage and calculate costs, a managed print services company will analyze data on your daily printer usage. Over time, this data adds up to give an objective, quantitative measure of the exact amount of materials your organization uses. Data is usually analyzed on a per-year basis.
While saving a few sheets of paper or using less ink on a single day may not seem like a big deal, when analyzed in terms of an annual budget, it becomes clear how crucial managed print costs really are.
For example, if one of your employees were to save twenty pages of paper per day each business day, they’d be saving a hundred pages per week. At the end of the year, you would have used 5,200 fewer sheets of paper. After five years of following this pattern thanks to your MPS, you will have saved 26,000 sheets of paper overall. That means you will have also saved several trees, several hundred pounds of waste, and over one-thousand dollars in operating costs. When these figures apply to multiple employees, the savings in terms of both waste and dollars multiply accordingly.
It’s easy to see how printer management can result in more cost-effective printing. Utilizing an MPS provider provides you with an objective measure of all your managed print costs. This data can then be used to identify ways to cut costs.
With MPS, print environments can be monitored remotely. This gives you a huge advantage over companies that choose not to use managed print services. Remote management gives you the ability to track the data that you must have in order to successfully measure your managed print costs. In this way, MPS providers do not need to constantly be involved in your print management. They simply keep tabs on that information from afar and use it to calculate costs later.
Managed Print Costs Summarized
All in all, MPS help organizations cut printing costs in more ways than one. Without MPS, many of the most complex printing jobs would be costlier and less efficient. Managed print services identify printer usage and calculate costs via remote management services and print management software.
Using remote management services, managed print services can monitor printer usage. This data accumulates overtime and allows an MPS provider to calculate costs. Print management software can track the number of supplies being used and waste being created while also providing psychological incentives to cultivate more efficient habits in employees. Managed print services can prove to be invaluable to an organization that relies heavily on printing physical documents on a regular basis. Doing without MPS will always be to the detriment of such organizations.