Organisations can achieve significant cost-savings by taking a holistic approach to managing their document output environments that ensures that their fleets of printers, copiers, and multifunction products (MFPs) are used in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.
Printer fleet management - the use of powerful software tools to manage output devices from multiple vendors - can help companies to understand where they are unnecessarily wasting money in their document output environments and to take corrective action, says Holger Groenert, Manager Product Marketing - Itec Distribution.
"In most typical corporate environments, one will find a mixture of different MFPs, printers, copiers and fax machines representing a range of models and vendors. They often have poor visibility into the total cost of their printing environment," says Groenert. "It might not be feasible for an organisation to standardise on a single vendor`s product and get rid of the rest of its devices. However, it can implement a range of tools and best practices to ensure that it manages this mixture of devices in the most efficient and cost-effective manner."
The challenge that most enterprises face is to see the complete picture in their document output environments - not only the print and device-related costs of the entire organisation, but also how their fleet is addressing its business needs, Groenert says. For example, a secretary might be using a laser jet that produces high-quality prints at 25 cents per page for internal memos when there is a printer that produces prints of a suitable quality for this purpose at six cents per page.
A print fleet management tool addresses issues such as this by providing a complete and detailed view of the document output fleet across the enterprise, and how it is being used, including print and cost history trends, usage comparisons, and problem history. Having this detailed information at hand can help companies to streamline the management of their devices in a number of ways.
They can track wastage and misuse of print devices since the software tracks every printer user, every output device and all printing activity. That means needless colour printing and other wasteful practices can be put to an endm while under-utilised devices can be identified and used more effectively. Organisations can also allocate printer users to cost centres for the purposes of internal billing.
The information that such a software tool produces can also give an enterprise insight into opportunities to optimise the printer environment by identifying opportunities to centralise printing, consolidate hardware suppliers and service providers, and reduce the number of devices, says Groenert.
Concludes Groenert: "A good service provider in the document output space is one that helps clients take charge of their printing environments by giving them the tools they need to monitor and manage printing usages and costs. The more that a company knows about its entire printer fleet, the more opportunities it will have to save money and optimise its document output environment."
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