If you’re wondering what the benefits of managed document services could be for you and your business, here's a breakdown.
Firstly, it’s important to remember ‘printing’ doesn’t just mean the documents you print. It’s the complete system. It’s about optimising printers, copiers, scanners and their output, as well as the people and processes that support these devices; from each individual page printed or scanned and the devices used, to the support desk and all the consumables that are part of the process.
Managed Print Partners offers a complete managed document service to create a seamless infrastructure tailored to your business. To find out more about how we can help you, and save you money, get in contact today.
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.
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.”
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. After all, its printers and copiers we’re talking about. How difficult can it be? However, the question should not be how hard understanding print equipment is; instead 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 and document management can apply to any business, regardless of size and print equipment quantity.
Most organisations do not take the time to define a print 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 30%.
Most businesses do not have an exact understanding of their print costs. Commonly we find businesses only take into account 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 already suggested, implementing a print process could save your business up to 30%. Additionally, an initial print technology assessment 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 cost-saving benefits are achieved by:
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 free print audit to get a more solidified answer to the question, “How do I know if Managed Document Services is right for my business?” Your assessment results will give you your answer.
HP Device as a Service (DaaS) combines world-class HP computing devices, mobile and tablet technology with support and lifecycle services. HP DaaS simplifies device acquisition, improves device management, and optimises device usage - all for one fixed monthly price.
Benefits include:
HP DaaS is offered by Managed Print Partners.
There are countless reasons which exist as to why companies upgrade to managed document solutions (MDS), but here we will focus on the most prevalent motives for a successful business strategy.
By gaining better insights into what’s being printed, volumes being printed, and by whom, the cost savings start to add up significantly over time — resulting in greater profitability for your organisation. Leading analyst firms report that companies can often save around 30% of their printing costs when they use quality MDS.
Increasing your organisational efficiency is often comes down to improving the efficiency of teams and even the individuals in them. Personalisation of the embedded printer terminal enables programming for one-touch tasks that may be required on a regular basis by job functions — e.g. incoming invoices will benefit from a command that sends the scanned document simultaneously to one or more designated folders and to an email recipient.
Secure ‘pull printing’ means that you never print something and then get sidetracked on your way to the printer, enabling several team members to see it before you finally get there — instead, you send the job to the print server (or print cloud) and print it from any machine using your PIN or ID card.
All too often businesses consider their IT hardware and software as a sort of ‘necessary evil’ that can waste more time than it saves. To prevent such a paradigm from emerging, it pays to approach even something so trivial as printing as a valuable tool for giving your business the opportunity to thrive.
Moreover, in industries where additional regulations often apply — such as financial or healthcare sectors — MDS have the potential to be the ‘secret weapon’ to giving an organization a major advantage over its competitors, for example, the ability to make a claim like “We are GDPR compliant” when others may not be.
For more insight into managed document solutions, don’t hesitate to find it on our Twitter and LinkedIn.
The managed print sector did nothing to preserve its own reputation in the early days of printers, copiers and scanning devices. There was a short-term attitude which only looked as far as the next deal. The Xerox sales course was widely admired and berated in equal measure for the pressure cooker environment it created amongst sales teams and clients! They were however, extremely successful.
But as years have gone by and technology has become more widely used and therefore cheaper, the opportunity has arisen to save money and replace inefficient devices and end punitive print cost contracts. We often compare print to the mobile phone business as there are many similarities. Back then you paid for the device separately and then a huge amount per minute and text of usage. Today, you rarely pay for a phone, they have become commoditised and are rolled into the monthly contract cost and the price of calls, even international, have tumbled. Printers, document management systems and devices are much the same.
Thinking has changed and changed again where the concept of centralised print is concerned as more flexible working arrangements become commonplace and the traditional office set up almost ceases to exist.
Collectively these factors have resulted in major cost savings for clients that have failed to check their contracts or simply held on to faithful old machines for many years.
It may seem an excessive step to many, but the idea of a print and document management audit genuinely does throw up some great opportunities to not only save money but support flexible and remote working, making print more accessible. It’s a service we regularly deliver for our existing and prospective clients and by experiencing lots of different working practices and sectors, we tend to pick up lots of great ideas along the way that we can share with others. So a print audit is not just about reviewing print volumes, per copy costs etc it is also about spending time considering how the print and document management infrastructure can be adapted to help the business (and save money).
But the big question is, if we can save money, what sort of benefit can we expect to see? Over the last year, its not been unheard of for us to save clients 40%, whilst giving them new devices and reducing lease and ongoing costs for colour and mono print. On average the figure is normally 20-30% but as noted above, it does depend heavily on the elapsed time since your last major overhaul/review. Clients regularly surprise themselves when they sit and think about the last time they took a serious look at their devices and contracts. They are normally even more surprised by the number of additional machines that have snuck onto desks in the meantime!
As independent consultants with over 30 years’ experience we have witnessed huge change in the industry and have adapted to meet the needs of our varied clients. So, if your last managed print invoice lead you to draw a sharp intake of breath or your machines are starting to groan, it may be the right time to stop and look at your infrastructure and see how much you could save.
Centralised Print: To Centralise or Not to Centralise, that is the question
Of all the cyclical debates (jam or cream first on scones, chicken or egg etc.) the question of whether to centralise or decentralise your print infrastructure seems to come and go with the tides. We are regularly asked what is best and it must be said that industry thinking is that the pendulum has swung back towards decentralisation.
There are undoubtedly pros and cons for both options but the major driver, cost, is starting to pale into insignificance as the price of devices and cost per print, continues to come down.
Old school thinking said that centralised print was the only way forward. The idea being that by reducing the number of devices you save the capital cost and then the ongoing costs associated with running multiple devices. At that same time, this was an industry renowned for bad contracts with high penalties and punitive per print/copy charges and so many manufacturers did nothing to help change direction for this train of thought. Centralised print was also used by some suppliers as a clever way of creating lucrative contracts which included substantial hidden margins.
On top of the cost debate, the technology simply did not exist to connect devices easily or provide intelligent printing and so offices followed a more traditional format – everyone with their own desk, sat in departments etc. - and so there was limited demand for anything different.
Nowadays, many of these arguments have been shelved or overcome and the print industry has had to keep pace with the demand for more flexible working, hot desking, work from home and multi office environments. ‘Follow me’ print and cloud server based print technology now allows users to pick up their print from wherever they are working at that point in time, not always going back to a centralised hub.
Companies have also realised that there must be a balance because an over rationalised environment can have a serious impact on productivity of staff. Users are away from their desks for longer periods of time creating situations whereby phones ring longer, go unanswered and the response to customer demands is slower.
Costs continue to fall and, if you choose your partner carefully, managed print contracts are not as painful as those of the 80s and early 90s. Historically, cheap to buy devices typically had excessive toner and ink consumable costs, with a colour print costing as much as 20p. Recently though, similar desktop devices which are cheap to buy, or rent, have seen the full colour consumable running costs and service support contracts get as low as 2.85ppp, depending on volumes. If you are lucky you may be paying something similar to this already on a per print basis with a mid-high volume centralised device, but you will most likely be paying an expensive quarterly lease rental charge in addition for the device itself.
More importantly these low-cost devices print at speeds of 40-50-60 pages per minute and handle volumes of up to 20,000 prints per month making them great for busy offices. Latest service offerings ensure that if there are any issues with the device not functioning properly, at any point in the contract, it can be swapped out for a direct replacement at no additional cost. So, if a mid-high volume machine does fail there is limited or no impact of productivity for the business.
Like everything in life, we say exercise some moderation and aim for a happy medium, somewhere between plurality and centralised print. An audit of current structure set against a background of desired outcomes can normally find the right balance. Why not contact us today to organise an audit?