Printing is a technical process that is an essential part of many business workflows. What could ever go wrong with it? It might seem a routine task—you just send documents to the printer and get a printout. The reality is a little different: toner or ink depletion, faulty equipment, or long printing queues for can make these process very expensive.
What are Managed Print Services?
MPS is an outsourcing service that provides the customer with optimized printing infrastructure operating without idleness and outages.
Let's take a real-life example.
Customer: a logistic company.
Problem: the vehicle loading time is strictly defined, but the cargoes cannot be sent from a warehouse without accompanying documents. A one-hour delay in vehicle departure caused by the unavailability of printing service could cost 5 M RUB (a real-life story).
Solution: outsourcing printing processes and optimizing the printing infrastructure.
What problems are solved by MPS?
- Inefficiency of device operation and document workflows. Of course, every employee can get a personal printer, but is it necessary? 90% of the time, this equipment will be idle.
- Non-transparency. Hidden costs associated with delivery, administration, and storage. The equipment requires consumables and spare that need to be bought and delivered in time. Supporting these processes requires a considerable amount of staff time and costs.
- Overload of some devices and an insufficient load of others, system idleness. One printer always gathers crowds of employees, and two others are barely ever visited. As a result, one printer is quickly worn out, and two others gather dust. This is hardly an optimal use of resources.
- The need for fleet management and a large budget for IT services and maintenance. Printers work in a network which should be administered, and devices need preventive maintenance and repair. All this is converted into budget articles and sometimes even requires full-time employees.
- Sudden need for equipment and high costs of consumables and spare parts. When one printer goes down, the load on other devices increases. What if two other printers also break? You will have to urgently buy a replacement, the money for which was not allocated in the budget, and set up the device. Toner, ink cartridges, ink, paper... they also require a considerable amount of money.
- High energy and paper consumption, waste disposal problem. Everything is clear about paper and energy. But how to dispose of used cartridges? They require special recycling. Moreover, how to get rid of tons of unclaimed printouts?
- Negligence and uncontrolled printing of documents. Did you know that according to the statistics, up to 30% of the printed papers remain unclaimed? That is, the equipment works, resources are consumed, and then everything is thrown away. Or did you know how many printouts employees make for personal use? One sheet is not a problem, but what about a thousand? Or ten thousand? Needless to say, the printed documents, including those with confidential information, can be easily taken out of the office. Restriction of file transfer to external media, control over the correspondence being sent are of little use if unscrupulous employees can print out data that constitutes a commercial secret and take it away.
How to streamline the printing process?
Softline offers several tiers of services aimed to solve the problems related to printing.
Ensuring the uninterrupted operation of printing infrastructure. At this level, we help employees with consumables, resources, and maintenance engineers.
Benefits:
- Technical maintenance and incident resolution under the SLA.
- Predictable budget: printing costs are direct costs
- Proactive monitoring and collection of statistics on printing ensure uninterrupted operation.
- Unified equipment maintenance standards reduce the time required for equipment servicing.
Printing infrastructure optimization. The more printers the company has, the more the number of cases when it has to hire specialized engineers is. The more diverse is the set of equipment and the older it is, the more difficult it is to maintain it. Our printing infrastructure optimization service comprises a set of measures that will relieve you from maintaining a redundant printing fleet.
Benefits:
- Equipment replacement and positioning planning: print in the volumes you need and in the places where it is necessary (print-room/print-zone).
- Printing stream and policy management.
- Hardware as a Service (HaaS).
- Optimizing the customer's internal resources required to support the document workflow.
Turnkey managed printing services. At this service tier, the printing infrastructure is entirely outsourced to Softline. Our company puts it into order, resolves the incidents, scales the infrastructure when necessary, predicts the peaks and drops of activity, configures access rights for new users, etc. This approach offers several payment options: separate payment for device leasing, staff services, and other services, or total sum for any amount of printed pages.
Benefits:
- New optimal equipment with forecasted up- and downscaling to meet the client's business dynamics.
- No upfront investments.
- Service model—"click charge" and "all-inclusive." You will be able to forecast medium- and long-term prospects.
- Transparent reporting by departments, divisions, branches, users, devices, applications, etc.
With all three options, you get a single point of contact and a single service provider, a single point of responsibility, consolidated reporting and monitoring of your printing infrastructure.
Not only printing but also scanning!
Softline offers the services of automated document scanning, recognition, and sorting on a portal, in data storage, or in a document management system. The implementation can include the work of an operator, who performs document scanning and puts them into a digital storage.
Remember about printing security!
DLP systems allow you to monitor the actions of users, but they unable to protect you from leaks in hard copy. Meanwhile, any employee can print out confidential documents and take them away. Another possible risk relates to the leak of classified documents, which have remained unclaimed for a long time and could be stolen by persons who do not have access to this information.
Print management systems such as MyQ, SafeQ, PaperCut, Ringdale FollowMe, etc., can control this potential data leak channel by analyzing users' printing permissions.
It is possible to implement deferred printing with an authorization by a pin code or access card. In this case, documents are sent to the printer and printed only in the presence of the owner. You can also select the files that you need to print because sometimes it happens that the version printed on paper is not the last, and contains some errors of drawbacks. In such a case, employees have to correct it and then reprint the updated document.
Of course, do not forget that up to 30% of the documents sent for printing remain unclaimed.
The economic effect of master printing services is very significant:
- Cost reduction: up to 30% for infrastructure maintenance, up to 30% for savings on the procurement of standardized consumables and spare parts; up to 50% for paper consumption and up to 50% for power consumption.
- Budgeting: transparency of printing costs; classification of cost items by device, departments, and cost centers.
- Optimization: savings of up to 30% of the printing budget; replacement and relocation of inefficient devices; reduction of the number of consumables and transparent budgeting of spare parts, TCO reduction thanks to lower maintenance.
All the above figures have been confirmed in practice. On average, our customers save from 15 to 20% after the implementation of printing management systems.
Interesting fact
Our company has experience in implementing paid printing in a library based on a card with a credit limit. The readers are now able to print documents in self-service mode, without resorting to the services of the organization's employees.
Out-of-the-box printing services
For small organizations and companies, where less than 100,000 copies are printed per month, we have launched an out-of-the-box printing service based on new XEROX or HP Inc. equipment. The companies that use this service can enjoy uninterrupted printing over a long-term period.
The out-of-the-box offer includes a set of services: device rental, supply of consumables and spare parts, cost of a given amount of copies, and an SLA. Pages printed above the amount included in the offer are charged separately. All incidents are eliminated on the next business day.
Benefits of an out-of-the-box printing service are as follows:
- Cost efficiency: total cost transparency, no capital investments.
- Productivity: a printing fleet tailored to the user requirements, guaranteed maintenance, and proactive monitoring.
- Planning and control: a single point of responsibility and SLA commitments.
The MPS services offered by Softline guarantee high system reliability. We ensure the system security and availability, and, if necessary, can provide 24x7 support.
