If your organization isn’t already taking steps to optimize print management, it should be. Printing expenses account for as much as three percent of a company’s annual revenue, and streamlining print operations has the potential to recoup a sizable portion of that cost.
That’s why identifying and implementing a good print-management solution can save you a hefty chunk of change in both the short and long term.
A good place to start is by taking an honest, thorough audit of your existing print-management infrastructure and practices. Then assess those against whatever print-management solutions you currently use. Some suggested focus areas include:
- Knowing your print environment: Which network and USB printers are the most heavily utilized? How does consumables usage vary from department to department? What is your print-server downtime each month? Answers to questions like these will help you get a better fix on your print environment and determine where opportunities are ripe for efficiency gains.
- Optimizing your printer fleet: Do you swap heavily utilized printing devices with less utilized ones to extend their lifespan? When devices are past their prime, are you dedicating extra costs into keeping them running? Budgeting for enterprise printer management is important here, too: Are you in the habit of pre-allocating funds for hardware replacement and upgrades?
- Looking to the future, not the status quo: Growing trends like mobile/BYOD printing and secure pull printing took many companies by surprise. As a result, their aging print environments couldn’t accommodate new technologies, putting them at a disadvantage. How future-proof is your print environment? Are you researching non-traditional print-management solutions to ensure that your print environment can easily adapt to changes to your workplace and workflow?
- Managing smarter, not harder: How does your organization handle basic enterprise printer management? Are you dependent on the service desk and technical support staff to perform routine printer installations, or are you empowering and engaging end users to do more on their own? Provisioning printers using group policy objects (GPOs) and scripts is common, but it’s not always the best—or only—method for targeted deployments.
Considering these factors, let’s consider your options. Outsourcing or consulting with a third-party company that specializes in enterprise printer management can help you optimize print management and save costs, but you may want to lay some important groundwork before handing the keys to your print environment over to an MSP.
Next-generation print-management solutions like PrinterLogic can play a vital role in your organization’s efforts to improve print processes and improve end-user satisfaction. PrinterLogic is a versatile, highly scalable solution that deploys rapidly, integrates seamlessly, and offers many benefits that conventional solutions simply can’t:
- Reduce print infrastructure and eliminate print servers altogether
- Centralize and simplify printer administration for the entire organization
- Configure print driver profiles so default settings are more economical but still offer users flexibility when needed
- Effortlessly deploy printers and drivers without GPOs and scripts
- Empower end users through a self-service printer installation portal
- Increase printing availability and dramatically reduce downtime
- Accelerate printing with virtual solutions like Citrix and VMware
- Future-proof your environment with advanced options like mobile/BYOD and secure pull printing
- Get print auditing and reporting capabilities for oversight and improved accountability
- Employ secure pull printing to cut down on wasteful printing and abandoned jobs
The proof is in the results. In a Citrix Virtual Apps/Virtual Desktops environment with a huge (3,400+) MSP-managed printer fleet, for example, UW Health saw a 70% overall decrease in print-related support costs after implementing PrinterLogic.
Or, learn how Helion Automotive Technologies reduced the time spent on print management, cut the time needed for print-server migrations to zero, and slashed printer downtime during daily operations—resulting in a threefold cost saving with PrinterLogic.
PrinterLogic’s unique approach to enterprise printer management has the power not only to cut costs, but to permanently optimize your entire print environment in ways that you never thought possible. Whether you need an on-prem solution or a SaaS edition such as PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud) we offer a free, full-featured demo and migration tool to help you test our solution in your environment. Try it for free for 30 days.