Do you find that poor printing infrastructure creates daily challenges for your business including substantial costs, lack of document security, potential GDPR risks and an unnecessary burden on your IT department? For one of the UK’s leading independent architectural companies the issue was no different.
Boasting a £35million turnover, over 200 employees and 10 offices across the UK, this company demanded a robust, structured system to ensure that all document management is as streamlined and efficient as possible.
Our client was looking for help to alleviate many of the difficulties it faced with its current supplier. Fundamental issues included:
The problem boiled down quite simply into the fact that our client was paying a lot of money for a very basic, inadequate service. Do any of the above sound familiar?
We began by auditing the company’s head office. The key priorities of the solution design were to:
MPP manage all our client’s printer requirements, including trouble shooting and monitoring and automatic replenishment of consumables.
We have reduced our client’s costs by 40%.
The next phase of our project is in the introduction of a rules based secure print solution to improve security and provide further efficiencies.
With the introduction of the above rules-based software, we know from experience that this will ensure ongoing reductions in our client’s print volumes.
With the above priorities in mind we created a structured, tailored solution that worked across multiple offices, and comprising of just one manufacturer.
“Having been highly recommended to us by a third party, we chose Managed Print Partners because they were independent consultants who took into account every part of our business – and didn’t just try and sell us one brand of hardware. MPP produced a cohesive, balanced deployment plan that suited our new working environment and even incorporated our tracking and billing software.
“The biggest impact the new systems have had on our business is the incredible cost reduction. Our costs have reduced by £100,000 p/a – we are now paying 40% less for 42 devices, including consumables, compared to the amount we were paying our last supplier for just 11.
What’s more, the printer-related calls to our help desk are now almost non-existent, which makes the whole system much more efficient. Managed Print Partners also provides invaluable ongoing support and advice. Knowing we can just pick up the phone and get a response straight away means we can focus on other areas of the business.”
You might have heard about Managed Document Services, but you’re not sure whether or not it is a service your business would benefit from. Ask yourself the following questions and uncover the benefit a Managed Document Services program could provide your business.
If you have 3 printers in your local small-town office or if you have hundreds in 10 offices scattered across the country, Managed Document Services are right for your business. The benefits of print management can apply to any business, regardless of size and print equipment quantity.
Most organisations do not take the time to define a document strategy. It is time-consuming and falls at the bottom of the priority list. A lack of process can cost a significant amount of money, in the long run. The costs correlated with printing can add up to between 1-10% of a businesses’ total revenue. Installing a print strategy that effectively monitors and manages your fleet of equipment can provide your company cost savings of up to 40%.
Most businesses do not have an exact understanding of their print costs. Commonly we find businesses only consider the cost of equipment, service and supplies. However, these hard costs are only a portion of what makes up your total printing investment.
When determining this number, you also have to consider numerous indirect costs that can significantly impact your total investment. You must take into account every component: equipment, supplies, maintenance, employee burden rates and equipment life. These add up much higher than anticipated, which is an unpleasant surprise for many businesses.
As we’ve suggested, implementing a process could save your business up to 40%. Additionally, an initial audit will uncover unknown print costs and missed savings opportunities. Many MDS programs save companies money because they allow employees to focus on their priorities and leave these print technology duties to professionals who perform these tasks on a daily basis.
These questions are positioned to get you thinking about your current print environment and how it is being managed. Every company has a unique situation, but we believe Managed Document Services will provide value to most businesses. Request a print audit to get a more solidified answer.
To succeed in the digital age, organisations need lean, integrated and most of all digital processes to support their business
As we move towards a cashless environment, the initial frenzy and confusion has given way to a paper-free work environment. With global-tech firms like Google and Amazon paving the way for digital payments, this has reduced the dependency on cash and pushed us towards the use of digital solutions. These initiatives have captured the imagination of a cashless economy thereby reducing our dependency on paper. In the corporate world, this could signal the beginning of a paperless culture. Let’s start by looking at some trends which show how imperative it is to build a paper-free work environment:
Paper Passé
The amount of paper used in organisations towards printing documents in a single day is astounding. According to the paperlessproject.com, globally, an average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper annually. These numbers can be changed drastically by integrating paperless solutions to avoid the needless printing of documents. One way for organisations to reduce costs and better manage discretionary spending is to automate invoice processing and disbursements.
Automation delivers an average of 29 per cent reduction in invoice processing costs. Also, manual expense reporting involving paper receipts and tedious expense report assembly are a burden on business travellers. Employees find collecting receipts and filling reimbursement forms very cumbersome. At the office, the finance department cringes at the thought of deciphering receipts copied manically onto sheets of paper, and everyone, especially CFOs keeping their eyes on cash flow, don’t like waiting to be paid. Further, if data is scattered across the business in paper form, it is impossible to get the full picture, let alone insights that are accurate and timely.
Digital Payments
The massive paper piles, tedious tasks, and inefficiency of paper-based processes are some of the things that employees detest. One key solution is digital payments. Compared to manual payment systems, it’s faster, more accurate, and rich in data that can improve decision-making and reporting.
CFOs look for a more integrated and automated payments approach with several benefits— most importantly, less manual labour and lower costs, freeing up resources for more strategic uses. Many of them also expect more accurate reporting, improved payment processing speed, visibility, control, data security, and compliance.
Improved ROI
Companies that have adopted electronic expense reporting have experienced a whopping 58% reduction in processing costs and greater ROI. The automated system enables employees to book travel plans that are compliant and cost-efficient, manage expenses without having to keep track of paper receipts or fill out spreadsheets and gain approvals more quickly. No more collecting paper receipts, filling out paper expense forms and trying to get reimbursed.
In a study by the Aberdeen Group, 48% of businesses indicate they want to improve their travel and expense processes and thereby, their visibility on spending. This enables them to see monthly spending and to be able to close the business’s books.
With an automated system, there is more benefit in terms of heightened productivity, minimal need for manual input of T&E spend data, and optimal use of data mining and insight to flag out-of-policy spend. Plus, the benefits to the environment are immense – forgoing 55,000 receipts can spare as much as an entire tree!
To succeed in the digital age, organisations need lean, integrated — and most of all digital processes to support their business. Finance and procurement decision makers who prioritise fast, connected, and insight-led payment processes will surpass those who continue to rely on inflexible, disconnected, paper-based systems. Solutions that integrate systems with automated payment tools can generate important operational efficiencies, such as reduced manual labour and costs as well as greater visibility and control over payments.
For some businesses, the promise of a paperless office is still more a dream than a reality. But it shouldn't be, as the technology has now caught up with the idea.
In fact, going paperless makes it easier to back up your work and keep it safe.
In 2014, Gartner estimated that the cost of filing, storing and retrieving paper for US businesses was between $25bn and $35bn. This cost only hints at the complexity and pitfalls involved.
Going paperless and implementing a cloud-based document management system (DMS) immediately improves things. By converting paper to digital as early as possible, and filing securely in an encrypted DMS, your company solves a lot of problems in one go, aside from just freeing up physical space.
A DMS frees you from using standard filing convention, with tags letting a document surface in different locations without having to make copies. This simplifies storage and retrieval and means that you only have the one master document. Should changes to that one document need to be made, they will be reflected everywhere without having to redo any copies.
One of the significant problems with paper storage is that it’s easy for a document to go missing, or for someone to file it in the wrong place. With a DMS, these problems go away. Now, users can only digitally check out a document, but the original copy remains in the DMS where it can’t be lost.
Remote working can also be improved by going paperless. Sales people out on the road, for example, can use technology like Brother’s scan-to-cloud to digitise documents in real time. There is no chance that a postal order, contract or other important piece of documentation can go missing before the sales person returns to base.
Storing everything in the cloud has ancillary benefits, too. First, and most importantly, the IT department no longer needs to create complex backup routines to try to save data. In this case, if a user created a local file and picked the “wrong” folder to save it in, or their computer crashed between backups, critical data could be lost.
With the cloud, every change is saved instantly without the user having to do anything. This instant approach means the old days of backups are dead.
Next, versioning is improved dramatically, as each change can be saved as a different version. Should you need to check for edits and roll back to a previous version, you will easily be able to do this. Doing the same thing with a locally stored document simply is not possible.
Thanks to the distributed nature of cloud computing, all of your data is safe in the cloud. Life in a paper-filled world was different, as a single fire could wipe out all the documents the business had to its name, including copies. Now, should your building burn down, none of your data would be lost – including all scanned documents.
While moving to the cloud is more convenient, the danger that a lot of company’s face is data security. This is particularly true with the General Data Protection Regulation that came into law in May 2018. Under this new directive, any company that fails to secure its data and maintain compliance with the law can be fined up to €20m or 4pc of its worldwide turnover, whichever is greatest.
If nothing else, the financial threat should be enough to convince companies that they need to lock down all data. Moving to a paperless world helps you do that.
With paper documents filed away in a room, it can be hard to restrict access on a per-document basis. Once an employee gets into your filing system, they can look at practically any document they want, which is a huge threat to privacy.
With a DMS and cloud storage, your business has per-document controls that it should implement. Every business should review who has access to what and make sure that they are not over-sharing. As a general rule, employees should only be able to access the data that they require to do their job, no more.
There are different levels of access, too. For example, you may want to prevent users from being able to delete documents; instead, they may be able to remove them from their view, leaving the original behind, which a system administrator can restore or look at. You should also look at other controls. Some employees, for example, may need read-only access to information, but shouldn’t be allowed to copy or print the data.
Implemented correctly, a paperless office gives your business more control over its documents, better data security, and instant backups and versions.
The medical industry requires robust and secure systems for its document workflow and print processes. Confidentiality is a critical factor that affects every area of every organisation, and many struggle to comply with changing regulations. From a business perspective, cost savings and efficiency are also major issues - wouldn’t you agree?
For one of the medical industry experts, these issues became very apparent when planning a move in 2016 from a five-site setup to one collaborative head office in London. Patient, client and employee confidentiality was not as secure as it needed to be and the organisation knew processes needed to be updated to fit with their new office layout.
With over 800 employees in the business and a thriving HR department, it was unsurprising that our client had accumulated a vast number of printers and devices. In addition, with security and confidentiality a key focus, the costs of printing became a secondary factor.
We began by auditing the company’s offices.
The key priorities were to:
By using secure print software that integrates staff identification, we guaranteed the best leading digital security software and solutions to ensure our client’s important information remains confidential.
MPP reduced the fleet size by 80% by installing less but more robust and productive devices. MPP optimised our client’s printer/copier estate from 306 devices to just 49 and implemented a secure “follow me” solution that also reduced volumes and improved efficiencies.
MPP reduced our client’s annual costs by 35%.
By utilising our secure and effective document management software we reduced our client’s environmental footprint, lowered their costs drastically and helped them to move towards a paper-less environment.
“Having been recommended to us by a business contact, we asked Managed Print Partners to carry out an intensive audit. The findings were astounding – we estimated we had around 190 devices, but MPP discovered 306 devices in our fleet, all from countless manufacturers and suppliers.
As experts in the medical industry, confidentiality is key – especially with GDPR on the horizon. Managed Print Partners helped us overcome privacy issues by putting a secure print solution in place, helping us automatically comply with many data protection regulations and improve security company-wide. The audit also outlined areas of potential cost-savings and efficiency, saving us an estimated £150,000 p/a. What’s more MPP helped us manage our expanding HR department by providing and managing a digital scanning solution.
All the advice given by Managed Print Partners was independent and tailored to us. Plus, the team fully manage our service now and have done for over 12 months, which allows us to focus on our core business. Originally, we were hoping to achieve a more tailored, secure system, and Managed Print Partners delivered this and more, but the incredible added savings were a bonus for our business too.”
Organisations that are ahead of their peers in the digitisation journey are outperforming them in profitability, customer loyalty and employee engagement, according to Quocirca. A digital transformation strategy that is geared towards improving process efficiency across both paper and digital information pays dividends – but achieving this level of maturity is a challenge. How do you know what technologies and delivery models to adopt, for example?
MPP are exceptionally well positioned to become an organisation’s strategic partner in the drive to accelerate the digitisation process. Our offering has evolved beyond other MDS service providers’ traditional roots of print, into broader solutions and services that automate business processes and optimise workflows.
Successful digital transformation extends beyond simply digitising paper documents and paper-intensive processes such as invoicing. This is a vital starting point, of course. The use of scanning and capture technologies increases operational efficiency, reduces storage costs, and enables rapid access to timely and relevant information.
A mature approach must broaden out from digitising paper, however, to the optimisation of information management through business process automation. This may require the complete re-engineering of a process through the leveraging of workflow automation technologies and platforms. Automating information-intensive processes enables organisations to realise valuable wider benefits such as improved collaboration and an enhanced customer experience.
Despite almost 70% of organisations recognising digitisation as a key element of an information management strategy, businesses remain reliant on paper-based processes. Almost 60% of those surveyed report that up to 30% of their processes use paper, with the most cited reason being the need for physical signatures.
In addition to being inefficient and costly, this dependence on paper leaves an enterprise open to security vulnerabilities and compliance issues.
More than 80% of companies believe increasing business process efficiency to be a very important factor in driving digitisation. Almost two-thirds have already digitised several business processes, with the most common areas being records management (41%), claims processing (32%) and accounts payable/receivable (30%).
The most mature organisations in the survey – those identified as ‘digital leaders’ – combine a clear digital transformation strategy with investment in business and workflow automation tools.
Implementing integrated, enterprise-wide policies to control and manage both paper and digital information is essential. While 44% of businesses have done this, only 15% report that paper and digital workflow integration is very effective.
The other key driver of digital maturity is the implementation of workflow solutions which enable more effective information sharing, collaboration and efficiency. The digital leaders in Quocirca’s survey have invested in a range of solutions such as e-invoicing, e-signatures and document capture.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach for digital transformation, and it requires significant cultural change for some. Business process automation typically demands strong employee and executive commitment, supported by governance and change management. The biggest challenge is securing employee commitment, cited by 46% of respondents as their main hurdle. Justifying investment is another common obstacle, resulting in silos of automation around the business which cannot be integrated.
The sheer scope of digital transformation projects is a challenge. Each organisation must take action across a number of areas, including paper digitisation, automating back-office applications, information management and collaboration, and implementing new digital customer engagement models.
This complexity is driving enterprises to look for partners that can support the entire digital transformation journey, augmenting their strategic capabilities and enabling full business process automation by implementing solutions that can be integrated with existing infrastructure.
Our breadth and depth of experience gives MPP an edge as a trusted and strategic partner for long-term digital transformation. Partnering with MPP brings organisations deep technical expertise, best practice, scale and flexibility and best-in-class service levels.
MDS is an established approach to reducing the cost, complexity and risk associated with an unmanaged print infrastructure. We have extended our capabilities to encompass broader information management and business and workflow automation offerings, including software and services.
This gives us the unique advantage of being able to provide a strategic, holistic assessment of the complete information lifecycle – both paper and digital – and to recommend opportunities for automation.
Drawing from our extensive solutions portfolios, we can then provide tools and software to improve workflow efficiency. Through proprietary technology and strategic partnerships, we are able to offer solutions and services that cover most areas of digital transformation – document capture, processing, workflow integration and automation, content management and customer communications.
Almost half of the businesses in the Quocirca survey currently use an MDS provider for digitisation/workflow automation, with a further 32% planning to do so. The findings reveal that those which use MDS already are ahead of the curve when it comes to their digitisation and business process automation strategy: 77% reported that they were effective in integrating paper and digital workflows compared to 56% of those not using MDS.
Organisations that succeed in accelerating their digital transformation strategy can significantly boost business value, profitability and efficiency. There is a big opportunity for businesses in the UK to improve their maturity in this area: 40% of US organisations are ‘digital leaders’, compared to just 16% of UK organisations.
A business must evaluate potential MDS partners on the basis that they can support ongoing digital transformation and continuous innovation, like MPP can. We have a broad spectrum of offerings with joint technology integration to ensure interoperability and use analytics to identify opportunities for continuous improvement.
MPP also perform a more proactive role in supporting digital transformation. We build the capability to provide a strategic roadmap for organisations – one which involves benchmarking and maturity assessments, and the detailed evaluation of business processes to prioritise business needs. We offer a flexible, modular and industry-focused portfolio of solutions that supports a phased approach. Above all, MPP are able to align with the customer’s business strategy approach and retain a sharp focus on delivering business outcomes and value.