Close
How do I manage print so that it lessens the burden on my IT department and increases employee productivity?
Effective print services are those that succeed when it comes to reducing costs, improving security and promoting print optimization.
Increase IT productivity
In today's highly competitive landscape, businesses are constantly evolving — relocating print servers during office moves, adding new servers during times of expansion and often losing track of unused servers. Actively managing the number of print jobs that are single-sided or always in colour or the wrong file size for the selected printer can be a challenge. The burden falls on your IT team to monitor the efficiency and security of your print infrastructure and paper-based information. With so much responsibility — your IT team may struggle to keep your print environment up and running, let alone provide useful analytics about utilization, usage patterns and other statistics that can be that can be helpful in improving performance.
Print services help reduce unnecessary spending
An optimized print environment not only frees up invaluable IT resources but it also increases overall employee productivity. As you integrate mobile print and cloud printing into your print infrastructure — you are providing a consistent user experience — which saves time and helps to increase overall productivity. Remote employees can print from their smartphone and other mobile devices to the cloud, enabling them to print from anywhere. Quality print services — including a pay-as-you-go cloud service — reduce unnecessary spending on unused or underutilized print servers, expensive print software and the high costs associated with inaccurate device-to-user ratios. Additionally, cloud-based print services improve print security by authenticating users and utilizing a swipe card, proximity card or PIN authentication.
Data losses remain prevalent, with 60% of organizations reporting at least one print-related data breach in the past year.1
Mitigate and monitor print security issues
Almost half of all respondents in Quocirca's latest print survey indicate that paper is very important to their daily business. Yet, unorganized or unmanaged paper-based processes can pose security risks to enterprise businesses. For this reason, many organizations are turning to Managed Print Services (MPS) to help them address the cost, complexity and risk of an unmanaged print infrastructure. Furthermore, as the market matures and businesses undergo digital transformation — there is even more opportunity to drive greater business value. Cloud-based printing, or printing from the cloud, provides automatic security features such as secure print release, device data encryption and a Data Overwrite Security System (DOSS).
Continually optimize for better performance
Print optimization — including rightsizing the number and type of devices within your organization, implementing analytics to provide valuable print insights and consolidation to improve user-to-device ratios — is critical to the smooth operation of your print environment. The best print solutions available offer the ability to automate manual tasks and provide a single point of control to:
- View printers, IP addresses and status alerts.
- Direct print to the most cost-effective devices.
- Enforce duplex printing.
- Default to black-and-white printing.
- Gather data about utilization, usage patterns and more.
- Produce standard and custom reports.
More information
Ready to transform your business?
Talk to a Ricoh professional about your specific business needs and how we can help you overcome your unique challenges.