The Many Benefits of Managed Print Services
You don’t have to dig too deep to understand why adoption of Managed Print Services (MPS) is on the rise.
Cutting operational costs and streamlining workflows to enhance competitiveness make a compelling case for Enterprise IT leaders to bring in an MPS provider.
It’s their job to evaluate print usage and document workflow and recommend enhancements or automation to make improvements. Transparency Market Research projects the MPS market to reach nearly $95 billion by 2024.
From an operational cost perspective, MPS offers more than one advantage: office-wide printing consolidation, equipment upgrades, IT burden reduction and data breach mitigation.
First, by consolidating office-wide printing, MPS enables companies to gain insight into print usage patterns and demand to ensure that the right equipment is installed in the most appropriate locations.
This insight results in device consolidation through a higher ratio of employees per printer, fewer supplies and a reduction in wasted paper.
MPS also results in substantial savings through the replacement of older, less efficient equipment.
Newer equipment also means access to the latest technology for printing, scanning and faxing documents, including a powerful line of new A3 multifunction printers (MFP) solutions. A3 MFP printers deliver the performance, printer speed, and cost per copy that up to now only copiers could offer.
As the A3 MFP market continues to advance, innovative solutions are providing customers with enhancements such as smart device service functionality, designed to make real-time adjustments to prevent failures.
Time also is money and MPS helps to relieve IT managers of the responsibility to service and support printers and multifunction devices and focus instead on strategic business initiatives.
MPS not only frees up the IT department; admin staff no longer needs to order ink and toner supplies, as this task is automated with MPS.
Data breaches represent a massive potential cost and reputation risk that can be mitigated through the use of MPS.
Increasingly hackers are targeting networked printers as a way to access sensitive company information.
By injecting malware into unprotected multifunction printers and copiers, which have their own hard drives and network connections, hackers can intercept printing jobs traveling over a network.
This can result in substantial financial loss as well as potential violations in privacy compliance.
To bolster network security, MPS firms provide complete security assessments and secure printing solutions as an integral part of their offering.
MPS Streamlines Workflow
Success in today’s global economy can require comprehensive enterprise transformation. Recognizing the need to boost productivity and efficiency for increased competitiveness is another strategic reason organizations are increasingly turning to MPS.
Through innovative hardware, software and services, MPS is helping these organizations harness the power of information within their printing environment to streamline and enhance workflows.
MPS providers assess what is working in an organization’s document and print environment and what isn’t.
They put a plan in place to optimize and streamline processes and workflows as well as manage the print fleet to ensure the optimum use of devices and the reduction of downtime.
An MPS provider may recommend the consolidation of devices through use of a multifunction printer (MFP) to replace separate devices for copying, printing, scanning and faxing.
Recommendations for the placement of devices can also improve workflow and productivity.
Print monitoring software helps to streamline processes by collecting usage data to help determine where adjustments can be made and identify potential problems.
MPS can help bridge the paper to digital gap with sophisticated capturing and routing capabilities that integrate with enterprise content management (ECM) and other enterprise systems.
And intelligent data capture solutions can extract information from unstructured or semi-structured documents using sophisticated document and character recognition software to ensure data quality at the point of capture.
Far more than reducing the amount of paper produced within an organization, MPS is a strategic initiative to cut costs and continuously improve document management and workflow.
Christoph Schell is President Americas at HP.
