Managed Print

In MPS or print management projects, one of the quickest and most measureable cost savings efforts is focused around device consolidation. It is hard to find an organisation today that doesn’t have an excessive amount of personal printers, or old equipment, that can be eliminated entirely or replaced by modern technology.

Equitrac customers are no exception to this:

• KeyBank reduced their print fleet from 12,000 devices to 3,000
• Liverpool John Moores University went from 750 print/copy or fax devices down to 250
• Peirce College had 50-60 personal printers and 15 MFPs and reduced that number to 20 new MFPs

This list goes on and on, and this ratio of at least a 3:1 reduction in devices is very common. And the cost savings are dramatic when you consider how expensive desktop printers are to operate, manage and maintain. The evidence is so compelling that it is hard to believe that every company wouldn’t jump at the chance to recognise the savings and start pulling out every desktop printer in their organisation.

What’s stopping them? User resistance. Perhaps you’ve heard one of these excuses:

• “You can’t take my printer, I won’t be as productive”
• “I have this printer because I print confidential information”
• “Why do you want to take this, I purchase my ink and just expense it. It’s not an IT issue or expense.”
• “I only print small jobs on this printer. How much can it really cost?”

There are a variety of approaches to helping overcome this user resistance and paving the way for behaviour change. First and foremost is communication. Demonstrate the reason that you are asking to take away a printer. Show reports on how much an employee is costing the company. Talk about the benefits to the environment by printing on more efficient devices. And explain that you are providing new tools and better technology that will actually improve their experience.

It is those tools and improved technology that will really make the case. With more modern print hardware you can deliver a better quality printed page, faster printing for large jobs and offer colour printing to the people who need it at a more affordable price. Using secure print technology like Follow-You Printing can alleviate the concerns over confidentiality since no job is released until the user authenticates at the device. And intelligent print rules & routing software takes the burden off of the user to decide which printer is best for each print job…they just hit print and a pop-up window will give them options of where to print the job and the associated costs. A modern print infrastructure will help employees be more productive, documents be more secure, and IT be able to focus on strategic activities…not printer support.

Finally, go back to communication. After six months, let employees know that the company has saved thousands of dollars thanks to their changed print behaviour. Let them know about the tens of acres of trees that were not cut to produce paper they would have used. Reinforcing the difference they are making will spread and help continue to drive print behaviour improvements.

So…don’t hesitate to initiate a printer consolidation strategy. Most customers that I talk to said that at the onset they had employees who put up a fight. But everyone expressed that because they communicated early and often, and implemented the right technology, those grumblings stopped and users quickly realised that change was a good thing. Just don’t expect them to raise their hand and say “take my printer”.

For more information please contact us on 01962 835053 or email enquiries@processflows.co.uk

The lifecycle of a paper document used to be simple

A document originated on paper (like a form) or was printed out. That document than lived in a labelled file folder and was stored in a drawer, filing cabinet or even off-site storage – depending on how often it needed to be accessed.

When information from the document was needed, it was retrieved from storage – copied if necessary – interacted with, then returned to storage when completed. This was a repeatable, known process and worked fine, although using paper as the permanent record often led to very slow, inefficient processing of information and is prone to errors and loss.

A number of years ago, electronic document management changed the nature of paper from a permanent record to a medium for short-term interaction. Paper storage isn’t completely a thing of the past, particularly in regulated industries and government, but many of the permanent records of information are now kept electronically.

While you would expect that this change in workflows would reduce the amount of paper that is generated, this isn’t occurring. Instead, the evolution of paper from a permanent record to a short-term interaction with information has just changed how paper is used – not how much.
In fact, this shift has resulted in a document being printed far more times from its electronic master, compared with legacy paper filing systems. Why?

There is a preference by many people to use paper to interact with information.

Users print the document, use it, then most of the time discard it. The next time it is needed … you guessed it; it is printed again and discarded again.

This may evolve over time as tablets and mobile devices make people more comfortable working with information on screen vs. paper, but we aren’t there yet. So, with most business processes still reliant on paper output for records, transactions or simply for better readability (Gartner, 2011), the best approach to is to help users print smarter with print management. Apply print policies to ensure that when a document is printed it is printed securely and to the most cost effective device. Track print usage and let users know how much they are printing and how much it costs, they’ll be surprised at how many times they print and we’ve seen dramatic decreases just from that awareness. And give them the tools to make better printing decisions, such as pop-up alerts that recommend a re-direct of print jobs to more efficient printers.

Even as its use as a permanent record is declining, paper isn’t going anywhere, but the use of paper can be managed with significant cost, security and workflow improvement results.

If you would like any further information on our print management solution, please contact us on 01962 835053 or email enquiries@processflows.co.uk.

Control your print

Equitrac print management allows you to automatically control and manage how print flows throughout your organisation – improving productivity and maximising time.