For many organizations, the necessity of printing is inevitable. Typically business leaders consider the cost of paper, toner, and printing a necessary expense, and though their costs may creep up year after year, they don’t take action to change anything. By taking action and investing in a Print Management solution, such as PaperCut, organizations can gain valuable insights into how their print devices are being used, and make a conscious change to reduce and eliminate waste.
What is Print Management?
Put simply, print management is an organization’s intentional practice of monitoring and tracking print activities. It helps business leaders gain a better understanding of how multi-function printers connect to print-enabled devices such as desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Many organizations aren’t aware of what their print costs consist of, print management provides clarity to exactly what is printed and when.
Why invest in a Print Management System?
Organizations looking for ways to reduce print costs and maintain control over their printing should invest in Print Management. No matter how large your copier fleet, gaining insights and maintaining a secure and simple to use print ecosystem is beneficial. Print management products provide centralized administration for your organization’s sysadmins/IT managers. IT professionals can manage print fleets of all sizes with a powerful, feature-rich print management solution. They can also remotely deploy printer drivers and print queues, and other features to enable simple and secure printing.
Jennifer Muller, the North East Channel Manager for ecoprintQ, an authorized PaperCut channel partner, has sold the solution for 5 years and has had hundreds of software demonstrations and conversations about the benefits of print management. She says the top three features as to why PaperCut is so enticing are Find Me Printing, Secure Print Release, and Tracking and Reporting. Find Me Printing allows you to print to a central queue and release the job from any device. Secure Print Release requires users to use an authentication option such as their employee badge, key fob, username, or custom PIN to view and select what job to release. All of these activities can be tracked and reported on, with over 80 pre-built reports to cover every user, device, department, and other custom options.
The biggest benefit of print management is that you can fully understand your print ecosystem, knowing who is printing what and when. It reduces waste, saves money, and promotes a secure environment.
8 Reasons to Invest in Print Management
1. It’s better for the planet and for your wallet
Wasted prints, excess blank pages, overused toner, and other print jobs can quickly pile up and create waste for your organization. Aside from the financial impact of overprinting, print waste is a problem for organizations looking to be eco-friendly. Print Management software can allow for custom eco-friendly options and print job attributes that actively reduce waste.
2. It allows you to create a completely secure print system
Many MFPs and printers are considered to be “open points” for malicious actors and hackers. As these devices often handle sensitive financial and personnel data, keeping them secure should be a priority for your organization. Because of this, data needs to be protected at all points during the print process. Print management allows users to be safely validated before hitting print, jobs can be traced back to the user and device, and documents can be watermarked. These points can help prevent malicious acts and protect sensitive data and your employees.
3. It simplifies the print process
Your IT team can easily manage just one secure print queue rather than separate queues for each device. It also makes things simpler for your employees, with users able to send jobs to a central queue and release it from any authorized printer. It keeps your devices secure by only allowing the authorized user to release the print job, preventing the loss of important data or missing documents! A broken device won’t bring print jobs to a halt since users can choose a Plus, if a printer’s down, users can simply select another nearby.
4. You can print from any device at any time, from anywhere
Your employees are constantly on the move, with the growth of hot-desking, huddle rooms, and other spaces that don’t tie down an employee to their desk, the need to access the same tools from anywhere is all the more important. Users can push a job to the central queue then release the print from whichever device is close by. They can print from their laptop, tablet, and even mobile phone completely seamlessly.
5. It simplifies scanning
Print Management utilizes OCR (optical character recognition) to easily and securely scan and send text-searchable and editable documents. Rather than recreate PDFs just to edit them, users can easily scan, search, and update documents with just a few taps of a button.
6. It's scalable with your business
Print Management is designed to be flexible and scalable. No matter how many devices are in your organization, it can adapt to your unique needs. There’s no loss in visibility and you can get the same important granular data if you have 10 devices or 10,000.
7. It promotes positive print behavior
Creating initiatives without backing data to influence behavior can lead to little to no adoption. With reporting and custom insights you can see exactly which print behaviors need to be curbed across the organization, as well as any potential egregious individual behavior. You can get page logs, user summaries, department summaries, and other key information that can help promote positive change in your organization.
8. Users can adapt to it quickly
It’s designed for users to actually want to use it, increasing adoption and promoting long-term use. The admin console is simple for your IT team to use and install, taking the task of learning a new system off their plate.
How to Implement a Print Management System
Implementing a system like PaperCut is simple, you can choose to wrap it into a new copier service contract when buying your new Ricoh devices from PiF, or you can choose to implement it now. Either way, PiF can help! Complete the form below and someone from our team will get in touch with you.
