Have you ever looked at old predictions of what the future would be like? Some of them are shockingly accurate, but most end up looking silly. We still don’t really have flying cars, and despite the internet age dawning more than 30 years ago, we still use printers in every office of every business. It’s kind of crazy.

In fact, printing is every bit as important to businesses today as it was decades ago. With improving technology, printing is a chance to waste or save a lot of money and resources, and that is why Managed Print Services is a thriving solution in today’s competitive market. No matter your industry, your business can benefit from Managed Print Services, and we’re going to show you exactly how that works.

Managed Print Services Will Reduce Overhead

When you get started with a Managed Print Services provider, one of the first things to happen is an audit. They are going to look in great detail at how exactly you use printing (and copying and other related resources). That audit will allow them to ascertain your printing needs and then form a strategy around supplying those needs.

The reason this audit is conducted is that it pretty much always finds points of waste. As much as a business tries to minimize waste to maximize profit margins, some waste is inevitable, and allowing experts to take a scrutinizing look will find problems that might otherwise elude your notice forever. The initial service plan will already lower your overhead by eliminating the most overt cases of printing waste.

And that’s just the beginning. The very concept of outsourcing print services can help you save money. In general, when you outsource something like this, you’re essentially pooling costs with your vendor’s other clients. Instead of having your own internal IT team handle printing, you’re letting specialists take care of it, and because you aren’t their only client, you aren’t paying the full price of overhead for those services. The bottom line is that it saves you money.

Even after you establish a service plan, continued monitoring and analytics will find additional ways to cut costs. A good Managed Print Services provider will never stop looking for more opportunities to improve your printing systems. Because of that, you stand to incrementally gain value from maintaining the services for a very long time.

Managed Print Services Increases Efficiency

There are a few ways that Managed Print Services will save you money, but one of the most important is through efficiency improvements. Printing is a major part of your workflow — even if it isn’t your primary concern. Any time people have to wait for a printing job, you’re losing efficiency. Your service provider will help you optimize printing workflows to remove bottlenecks and eliminate this issue.

Additionally, managing and maintaining printing resources requires effort. If you’re handling everything internally, you’re spending a lot of labor specifically on printing. When you outsource, printer maintenance is no longer your direct concern. You aren’t wasting IT or other personnel resources on taking care of printers, and those staff members can focus their efforts on value-adding tasks.

That’s still not the whole story. Managed Print Services provides plenty more opportunity for efficiency gains. By off-siting some of your printing, you can reduce power consumption and utility costs. Using digitization services allows you to digitally catalog all of your documents. This makes it substantially faster and easier to find any particular document, and it’s also easier to share and collaborate because of this. 

Most of all, your service provider is responsible for your printing equipment. It’s in their best interest to prevent problems before they arise. This means that you can expect routine maintenance to be part of the strategy, and the implementation of that routine service prevents printers from facing catastrophic failures. This keeps some of the most intense downtimes from ever occurring, and even when downtime does happen, you can trust that your service provider has a plan in place to keep your workflows moving forward. Your worst-case scenarios are nowhere near as devastating because you have brought additional expertise into the fold.

Managed Print Services Boosts Security

Printer security is often overlooked, and it leads to a scary reality. Modern printers are network-enabled. It makes them far more efficient and effective, and in most cases, you can even send jobs to a printer over the internet. If the printer is on a network, it can be hacked. You might not think that matters much, but printers digitize documents and store digital copies of those documents. That means that hackers can access any of your documents through your networked printers (or copiers, etc.).

Managed Print Services is the best way to secure your devices. Even if you’ve been overlooking the issue, your service provider is an expert in printing security. They will ensure that everything is up to date and as protected as reasonably possible. They can even help you secure paper documents with professional document disposal and other related services.

Most of all, the service provider can provide additional training to your staff. More often than not, security breaches are related to employee behavior. You hire your team for their specific skills, and that rarely touches on cybersecurity. It’s unreasonable to expect every single person in every workplace to master the complicated topics of cybersecurity. But, a little bit of training that reviews cybersecurity best practices can eliminate the most common and egregious behaviors that put your business at risk, and your Managed Print Services provider can take care of that.

You can see how much there is to gain when you explore Managed Print Services. You can have a conversation with a real, live expert to learn a whole lot more. Contact Modern Office Methods today. We’ll go over standard plans and policies for Ohio businesses, and we can even show you how we will tailor the services to fit your specific workflow needs.