Top 3 Managed Print Benefits

Learn how a managed print solution can decrease your company's printing costs, reduce the amount of time your IT professionals spend on fixing printers, and increase employee productivity. Listen as Mike Smith, Managed Print Solutions Practice Lead at Acrodex, guides you through the benefits of this specialized solution.

Q&A with Managed Print Expert Mike Smith

"How Printing Has Evolved and How Companies Benefit"

 

An interview with Acrodex Managed Print Practice Lead Mike Smith

Q. Why is managed print a “right-now” solution?

A. In today’s economy when CFOs are looking at ways to cut costs, I show them how to do that very easily with a Managed Print Solution.

Typically, an organization today will spend up to 3% of its annual revenue – and these are Gartner researcher numbers – on printer operational costs. And our history has proven this to be correct, our clients will tell you that. They have all saved anywhere from 25% to 50% on print operational costs. The key here is that it isn’t going to cost the company anything to find out. We’re simply going to complete a discovery and design to show them where they can save money.

Q. How does Managed Print work?

A. We first complete a thorough analysis called a Print Fleet Assessment to find out the organization’s current situation and actual printing costs.  We visit the site, talk to employees, and determine what the real needs are. After the discovery process we then present a redesign and a detailed report on how a company can do more with less and reduce costs.

We often find organizations have inefficiencies in their print fleets. They often have older devices that are inefficient and cost more per printed page. But inefficiency doesn’t result because of one single thing, there are a number of areas for improvement. We offer advice by recognizing these inefficiencies, recommending new technology that organizations are perhaps not familiar with or are unaware existed and by getting rid of redundant old technology. We also help companies upgrade to print technology that is less expensive to operate, sometimes costing half the amount to run than when a company bought it 7 or 8 years ago.

Q. Why is there so much room for improvement when it comes to printing?

A. Companies often have no idea how many devices they have in their print fleet, how many pages they print or their current print costs. These numbers represent huge operational costs, but printing budgets are often non-existent or are simply overlooked.

For example, we worked with one organization that started out with 180 devices that were costing them a fortune…more than 0.045 per page. After we completed a discovery and design we reduced that fleet to120 devices and cut their operational costs by 35%.

Q. Reducing inefficiency is one thing, but are there other benefits to implementing a managed print strategy?

A. Companies wouldn’t be doing this if there wasn’t a definite and obvious cost savings. And these are just the surface costs. There are all sorts of hidden costs that people don’t realize. If you talk to an IT manager, he or she will typically run an organization’s print fleet, and the IT staff will spend 30% to 40% of their time handling print-related issues. Our Managed Print Solution staff take over this role and completely eliminate this need, which enables the IT department to spend more time on other critical IT matters. If something breaks, they call us and we dispatch a tech to fix it.  Every month we then provide a detailed billing summary report that identifies each printer/MFP device individually in the fleet.  The report details each device by make, model, serial number, location, CPC, charges and page volumes. One single invoice is then generated to reflect the total number of pages printed.

Q. How has the print industry changed in recent years?

A. The advent of digital technology has meant that print devices which previously used to only copy can now print, copy, scan, e-mail and fax. Printers and copiers are now one and the same. They are multifunctional devices (MFDs) and they really are the way of the future.  Multifunctional devices are also faster and provide better quality printing and copying – all for less cost per page

Q.    Aren’t modern offices moving away from printing paper, or towards “paperless” environments?

A. “Paperless” – I’ve heard this saying for ten years but the evidence suggests the opposite is true.  Paper usage has continually gone up on average 10% per year for the past ten years without fail. People, companies and organizations aren’t printing less – they’re printing more.  We have all sorts of documents going past our desk that we never had before.  We never had e-mail communications before, we never had Internet access before. People are going on to the web and reading magazines, news articles and all sorts of written communications. What do they do with it? They download it to a file and print it.  Anything – you name it, they’ll print it.