Managing Your Print Costs Effectively

Could Managed Print Services Save Your Business 30% on Printing Costs, and Give You a Greener Footprint?

You may have heard of Managed Print Services (MPS). They are a sophisticated way of making sure your business does not pay more than it should for what it prints.

MPS solutions are based around a ‘pence per page’ subscription model and software monitoring the energy consumption of the printers you have on your network.

MPS solutions come in all shapes and sizes, and it is very likely that there will be a Managed Print Services solution that is fit for your business – no matter how big or small you might be.

89% of SMEs in the UK have fewer than nine employees, and they have an average of 1.4 printers on their network. There are MPS solutions that can work to save money and environmental impact even for these small businesses.

Most of the larger printer providers (such as Xerox, Kyocera, Brother, Epson, HP and so on) offer some sort of MPS solution, with some of them (notably Brother and Epson) specifically tailoring solutions for even the smallest SME.

The aim is simple – to give you control and visibility of what your business is printing, to improve your environmental sustainability, and to enhance your document security.

Whilst MPS is not just for big business, bigger companies can certainly get huge benefits from it. When you look at your total print costs (the total cost of managing your printers, their output and the people and processes that support your entire print ‘fleet’) it can make up a very significant chunk of your total office supplies spend – often around 15% of your total expenditure.

If you think that’s an over-estimate, start to work it through as a rough approximation in your mind, and factor in:

·       The physical pages printed by office workers, mobile workers or production print operations;

·       The cost of running the desktop printers, multifunction printers, copiers, scanners, fax machines (yes, some people still have them) and high-volume printers;

·       The materials you are outsourcing for quick print jobs, mailing, distribution etc.;

·       The cost in IT resource (tech support, installations, move and change requests); and, the biggest factor of the lot,

·       Ink and toner consumables.

You can see how the cost soon mounts up.

How does it work?

For any credible MPS solution, a piece of software will be loaded on to your network to assess and audit your current print ‘fleet’ (your print ‘fleet’ is comprised of the printers you have on your network). The software will produce a report showing the current levels of usage and energy consumption from the printers you already have, regardless of what brand they are.

Most solutions will provide you with a suggested roadmap to reduce the number and types of printing devices you have, and optimise your supply of consumables, whilst meeting the needs of your business. This will help you to make informed decisions about whether the printers you currently have are working efficiently for your business.

The subscription model is set up based on a forecast of your likely toner or ink consumption and, instead of buying toner and ink cartridges on an ad hoc basis, fresh cartridges will be ordered automatically for you by the software on your system.

The bottom line:

You never run out of ink or toner, and you never have more than you need.

You reduce your environmental footprint – less paper, less energy consumption, and less waste.

Rather than just paying (often a lot of money) for cartridges whenever you run out, you simply pay for what you have used on a ‘pence per page’ basis which is calculated over the life of a contract – typically three or five years – which can save you as much as 30% on your printing costs.

Thanks for reading, and if you think that this information will be of use to someone else you know, please don’t hesitate to share it.

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