Managed Print Services Enhances Remote Work Environment
A new era of work has dawned upon us. Remote work is the norm. While a day in the office may include pets as coworkers and wearing casual clothes, working from home is a viable and efficient option for businesses these days.
According to a 2021 Upwork report, 26.7% of work will be remote in one year. With these unforeseen and drastic changes, businesses are now leveraging remote monitoring systems such as managed print services to ensure that workers can accomplish their tasks efficiently. This post will take an in-depth look into how managed print services enhance the remote work environment.
What Are Managed Print Services?
Managed print services (MPS) are not new to the office technology industry, even though they have evolved to become more accessible than ever before. Basically, MPS is an offering that combines a holistic look at your printing infrastructure through an analysis phase with a strategy for incorporating print, fax, and scan technology to enhance the efficiency and productivity of your business. In a nutshell, MPS are services offered by an external provider to manage or optimize a business’s document output.
Managed Print Solutions to Improve Hybrid and Remote Work Environments
Off-Network Printing for Hybrid Offices
Remote work happens in different places, including home offices, quiet cafes, on an airplane, libraries, among other places. In this new work environment, employees have the freedom to move around and work on the go as needed.
Off-network printing provides employees with the flexibility to send print jobs to printers within their workplace’s network from anywhere while maintaining a secure connection. Among the devices that can be used for off-network printing are desktops, laptops, tablets, or smartphones with the right applications.
Centralized Print Management for Remote Workers
With employees working from different places around the world, you are probably wondering how print requests and problems are managed. Well, the answer is centralized print management. IT managers can manage a business’s print environment system-wide from a single pane of glass. Gone are the days of IT technicians having to manually fix print-related problems in person. Even better, business-wide updates can be implemented simultaneously with centralized print management as well.
Benefits of Managed Print Services
An MPS program offers solutions and benefits to your business because it will:
1. Analyze Your Printing Needs
Whereas your IT department may be capable of analyzing your print fleet, it isn’t the best use of their time. An MPS provider has the experience of analyzing print fleets of different sizes. They also possess specialized knowledge pertaining to printer fleet consolidation methods. As such, they can help your business implement the proper equipment at an affordable price. Typically, the analysis considers all aspects of your business’s printing needs, including printing, scanning, faxing, and copying.
2. Improve Efficiency and Save Time
The duration employees spend on undertaking printing-related duties can be frustrating. Scanning, printing, or faxing documents using outdated hardware or poorly configured software is just the beginning. There is also the time spent replacing ink cartridges and fixing device malfunctions. An MPS can identify such issues and free up staff time so that they can focus on other important things– your staff will therefore be more productive.
3. Reduce Costs
Maintaining individual devices one at a time is more expensive than having an automated, cloud-based system that conducts maintenance at a scale. MPS connects devices to one monitoring system to ensure timely delivery of replacement toners and repairs.
Thoroughly auditing and assessing hardware can enable you to identify ways of consolidating them. After all, having multiple devices scattered around an organization will not only use up more space but will cost you high maintenance and electricity fees. A print expert can help you identify ways of cutting your costs.
4. Improve Print Security
Given the current state of cybersecurity, it is vital to control access to documents and print devices to ensure that confidential documents are secure. An MPS can implement printing security software to reduce vulnerability in your devices. For instance, the installation of employee keycards for releasing print jobs can prevent sensitive documents from lying around in output trays for anyone to take or see.
5. Improve Productivity
The printing needs of various departments in an organization often vary. Upon assessing the current and future needs of an organization, an MPS provider can recommend a tailored program for every department. This may include printing off-site or from mobile devices, for instance, or the need to print special types of document formats and sizes which a given department uses frequently.
6. Reduce Your Environmental Footprint
Reducing the number of printed consumables is all part of being a responsible corporate citizen. By including a monitoring system as part of your MPS package, you’ll be able to track the levels of print usage. As such, you’ll be better placed to intervene and minimize your environmental footprint. Upon doing that, you can show the results of your paper-saving initiative in your corporate responsibility report.
7. In-depth Employee Usage Reporting
Understanding how much your employees are printing helps create a clear picture of what equipment is needed and what policies you may need to establish, such as restricting color for a particular department. Based on the information in an employee usage report, you can put in place advanced access controls to provide an audit trail for your devices, thereby strengthening compliance with industry standards.
Managed Print Services Is Essential in the Current Work Environment
Managed print service solutions come in different forms and can be tailored for your business. It is a wholesome print solution that ensures that your IT staff stays focused on other priorities, enhances productivity, reduces costs, and generally enhances the efficiency of your work environment. Managed print services even reduce the workload of your IT staff, thereby increasing their efficiency. Whether you have a small office footprint or you are an office with several employees, MPS is worth a look. Contact us today to learn more about how managed print services can benefit your business.
