Print-management strategies range from traditional in-house solutions to outsourced managed services. We’ll examine some of the most significant benefits—including those offered by PrinterLogic’s print-management software—that can benefit your organization.
1. Eliminating or minimizing infrastructure
Traditional print-management solutions give you a limited choice: Distribute your print network across multiple print servers, or consolidate your infrastructure with a centralized print server. The former requires more hardware, oversight and maintenance. The latter creates a centralized point of failure that drives up the costs of redundancy and can jeopardize printing across an entire organization.
Both methods can place unnecessary burdens on WAN connections. An alternative is TCP/IP printer deployments, but conventional direct-IP environments are impossible to manage centrally.
PrinterLogic’s unique blend of reliable direct-IP printing with powerful centralized management scales to suit organizations of any size. Our print-management software can support an entire printer fleet—even in distributed environments—using minimal infrastructure and without the drawbacks of traditional print-management solutions. Even if a host server fails, PrinterLogic’s direct-IP backbone allows printing to continue as normal with no loss of core functionality. Incredibly, the same applies to our zero-footprint cloud solution, PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud).
2. Reducing print consumables costs
Consumables like toner and paper account for up to 20% of most printing budgets. Sometimes called “invisible costs,” consumables tend to be automatically restocked by support staff as needed. This means there’s very little incentive to curb unnecessary printing. Users rarely understand the full cost of printing a 30-page report, and can think nothing of printing a draft, making two or three changes, and printing the entire doc again.
But how can end users be made more aware of consumable overuse? How can departments gather data to monitor their consumption and incentivize resource conservation?
Traditional print servers make routine reporting complicated. Without supplemental software, print servers don’t offer detailed reporting on consumables usage. Companies that offer managed print services do monitor consumable usage, but this reporting is often wrapped up in more comprehensive contracts. Specialized data-gathering services are expensive, and that can offset potential cost savings.
Through built-in print auditing and reporting, PrinterLogic and its SaaS print-management software counterpart, PrinterLogic SaaS, offer real-time visibility into consumable usage for individual devices or whole printer fleets. This information can be automatically emailed to department heads, managers, or other decision-makers on a periodic basis. Your organization can use this shared data as a basis for efficiency initiatives and hardware fleet optimization.
3. Increasing productivity for IT staff and users
Printing downtime and interrupted print jobs set off a cascade of inefficiency, affecting end users, help-desk staff, and admins alike. Print servers consume a big percentage of IT’s time, and until the crises are over, these resources can’t be directed elsewhere. Managed print services may be able to handle these problems, but they’re not immune to downtime either, and they can take longer to respond to printing emergencies than in-house staff.
PrinterLogic is a comprehensive print management solution that integrates seamlessly with virtual environments like Citrix and VMware. The solution helps boost productivity across the print-management spectrum. PrinterLogic provides an intuitive and visual self-service portal that allows end users to identify and install printers with a single click—without help-desk assistance.
Our robust driver-management system sidesteps conflicts and software incompatibilities that can regularly crash print servers.
PrinterLogic solutions have been proven to drastically reduce print-related help-desk calls. Dialysis Clinic, Inc., which saw an estimated 90% reduction in printer-related support tickets after implementing PrinterLogic, is a not uncommon example.
Additional benefits of PrinterLogic
PrinterLogic also offers enhanced functionality with optional Pull Printing and Mobile Printing Modules. These improve consumables costs savings even more, and contribute to your organization’s environmental goals. Full-featured printing for mobile and BYOD users, and secure printing for confidential documents, are among the most sought-after print management capabilities today. Both PrinterLogic SaaS, our SaaS solution, and PrinterLogic’s traditional on-prem edition can add these capabilities.
To experience the many advantages of PrinterLogic’s print management features in your own organization, sign up to demo PrinterLogic for 30 days. It’s free and there are no limitations on features.