When you look around your office, do you see printers piled up with papers and people waiting to collect their print jobs? Or, just as problematic, do you see printers sitting idle, gathering dust and hardly getting used? Both are signs that your printer fleet is not meeting your company’s requirements and needs a rethink.
Today, we will discuss how to identify when your business is ready to expand and implement new and better print technology. Scaling up a printer fleet to meet your needs is not just a matter of buying more or newer technology. Knowing when and how to scale up your printer fleet takes careful planning and analysis to design a print solution that will fit a growing company’s needs.
If your offices rely on standalone printers scattered throughout various departments, you might need to consider consolidating them into more powerful multifunction printers. Or, if you find that your teams have desktop printers that only one person is using, you are probably not maximizing your print investment.
To find out if you need a more powerful multi-function device (MFD) solution that can meet the needs of a large department or team, you need to look at your current print usage. Ask yourself questions like:
A company can prevent a lot of unnecessary expenses and headaches by adopting MFDs. A single MFD can replace a handful of under-utilized single-function printers, scanners and/or fax machines, delivering new efficiencies and capabilities to any business. A Managed Print Service provider like GFC will be able to help assess your print needs and implement a multi-function solution that can replace inefficient single-use machines.
Running more print devices than you really need costs money, especially if the devices are out of date or frequently out of action. With a print management solution in place, you can ensure your prints are sent to the most efficient machines. As many organizations have no centralized control or management of devices, it can be difficult to identify where savings might be found.
However, with print management software tools, MFDs make it easier to optimize the day-to-day management of your printing and imaging environment through device monitoring.
Not only can multifunction printers copy, print, scan, fax and perform other tasks, but they offer more control and management capabilities. Many office workers rely on MFPs to scan printed documents and email them right to their inboxes so they have digital PDF versions that they can keep on file.
Single-function copiers are best suited for long, heavy-duty print jobs where hundreds or even thousands of copies are needed at a time. Meanwhile, a multifunction device can scan, batch and file documents and process them in the cloud. This way, your remote or hybrid teams can always have access to documents and files, even if they are not in the office or near their office copier. In addition, intelligent forms recognition ensures documents are recognized and pre-populated with the correct file name and metadata.
An office with individual copiers, scanners and fax machines cannot easily coordinate or unify your workflows. For example, if you are in the healthcare industry, an MFP can send HIPAA compliant files as easy as sending an email. That means you do not have to keep track of physical files anymore and do not need to maintain fax machine. And with advanced, MFPs, built-in protection erases all personal data from your printer as soon as it is sent, eliminating a major risk of data leaks.
As you can see, there are lots of powerful tools to scale up any company’s printing capabilities. If you need help scaling up your print technology, contact the experts at the Gordon Flesch Company. Our analysts are ready to help.
