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Like most modern businesses, your business is probably spending 1-3% of its annual revenue on printing-related costs. It's a small percentage, but an overall significant amount. But did you know that there’s an effective way to reduce your printing costs by up to 30%? It’s called managed print services, and it’s already worth almost $50 billion per annum, and is growing at almost 10% per year. Clearly, managed print services save time, money, and add value in a variety of ways for a growing number of businesses of every size. Let’s take a look at the five main ways that managed print services can reduce your printing costs, with the savings going straight to your bottom line.
What Are Managed Print Services?
To meet your business’s printing needs, you essentially have three options:
Use a Third-Party Print Shop
If your printing needs are minimal and irregular, you might only need to head down to a print specialist every time you need something printed. But the process takes time, adds counterparty risk, and is the most expensive of the three options. However, if your net spend is minimal, this method can be more cost-effective than investing in your own printing equipment.
DIY
For businesses that print regularly, it can be more cost-effective to purchase or lease printers and handle all your printing requirements in-house. There are potentially significant costs involved in buying printers outright, maintaining them, and managing the consumables like paper, ink, and toner. And it can save you from wasting manpower because you have to send someone to the local copy shop every time you need something printed.
Managed Print Services
Maintaining printers and ensuring your consumables never run out can be tricky, time-consuming, and an inefficient allocation of resources. The downtime and loss of productivity caused by broken or malfunctioning printing equipment can also become very expensive quickly.
That’s why many businesses choose to outsource the management of their printing needs to an expert. Managed print services providers will assess your requirements, recommend improvements, manage and maintain your machines and supplies, and provide a help desk and expert support. These services don’t just take a load off your (or your IT staff’s) shoulders and streamline your workflow – they can also save you significant amounts of money.
Five Ways MPS Helps You Save
Predictable Expenses
One of the main risks when you handle all your business’s printing in-house is the unpredictable expenses. Even if you take excellent care of them, hard-working machines like printers need regular maintenance and part replacement. You also need to keep a constant eye on your stocks of paper, toner, and/or ink. If you don’t have in-house printing experts on hand, repairs and maintenance will require calling in specialists, incurring a call-out fee on top of the repair costs.
With Managed Print Services, you typically get repairs, maintenance, supplies management, and more for a consistent monthly fee. This reliable, predictable expense makes it easier to budget and helps you sleep easier knowing that if something goes wrong, you’re covered and affordably so.
Reducing Inefficiencies
The chances are your printing set-up isn’t configured for optimal efficiency, which could be causing you to spend more than you need to. This is particularly true if your printer fleet and printing needs have expanded along with your business over time. Research shows that around 90% of businesses don’t even know how many printers they have.
Managed print services providers will conduct a thorough appraisal of your needs, usage, and equipment, and then recommend improvements. These could include replacing old machines with new ones that provide better performance and value-for-money, or condensing multiple inefficient machines into one highly productive machine.
There may be some up-front expenses in upgrading your machines. However, in the long run, the more efficient output and increased performance will reduce overall expenses, saving you money for years to come.
Streamlining Usage
Avoidable waste and inefficient usage patterns also probably cause you to spend more on printing than you need to. Team members wasting too much paper or printing in color when black and white would suffice means you’re wasting paper and ink/toner. Waiting a long time for their print job to finally make it to the top of a cluttered print queue can also reduce a business’s productivity.
Managed print services help keep tabs on usage patterns and identify wasteful processes and ways of improving them. Your supplier will typically also provide detailed analytics and usage statistics to help you keep on top of what’s happening and reduce unnecessary expenditure.
Management of Supplies
Running out of paper or ink at a crucial moment can be a disaster, causing delays and impacting customer service and sales. You might not be able to find the supplies you need when you run out, or have to pay an inflated price to obtain them in a hurry. At the same time, it can be a cumbersome, time-consuming process managing your consumables, which requires a certain level of technical expertise.
Your managed service provider will take care of all of that for you, often using automated systems that alert them (and you) when it’s time to stock up. They’ll also ensure you’re using the right consumables for your machine – using incorrect consumables can damage the printer, causing even bigger expenses. Plus, you’ll generally be assured of a stable, fair price.
Freeing Up IT Staff
Managed print services can also save you money by making better use of your IT staff. This is especially true if your employees are based in different locations, with your IT staff having to travel between them to attend to various issues. Unless you have dedicated printer specialists on your IT team, your techies would likely be better utilized attending to higher priority tasks than travelling to your office in the next town to fix yet another paper jam.
Managed print services provide centralized management of your printers and printing. That frees up your tech staff to focus on driving your business growth, increasing their productivity, and ultimately saving you money.
The Right Managed Print Services Provider
If any or all of the above scenarios ring true for you, it’s definitely time to consider managed print services as a solution to your printing needs. The next step is finding the right partner. If you’re in the Tulsa area, look no further than JD Young, a trusted provider of managed print services and all your other IT and office technology needs. Contact us today for a free consultation.