Rising Demand For Managed Print Services

The Managed Print Services market is still growing fast, expected to more than triple in the next eleven years from £19.50 Bn last year to £70.75 Bn by 2024[1],and it’s not hard to see why.

Managed Print Solutions typically haven’t sat high on the list of priorities for most companies; many are happy to take an ad-hoc approach to acquisition, supply and handling which ultimately makes their printing expenditure both hard to track and impossible to optimise.

Poorly managed printers are expensive, unreliable and susceptible to failure and the ensuing costs of repair or replacement. The use of non-standard, cheap toner impacts negatively on printer performance, often resulting in increased faults with the device, whilst suboptimal settings are consistently used, paper and ink are often not acquired from the most cost effective sources and ultimately a disorganised approach to printing across an organisation will quickly waste more money than a well-planned managed solution would cost.

Managed Print Solutions offer greater visibility and control over printing costs. Real-time monitoring and analytics to inform workflow improvement can have a huge impact on the bottom line. On average unmanaged print costs eat into 1-3% of revenue, and getting a clear picture of where the highest levels of inefficiency are occurring (and what’s causing them) has benefitted our previous customers with up to a 65% reduction in printer-related callout costs.

The best savings are available through a fully outsourced service, including an entire fleet refresh. This is largely due to the availability of much more efficient and reliable printer technology which can be difficult to justify as an outright acquisition even when existing provisions are outdated, but transparently beneficial and cost-effective as part of a fully managed service.

An MPS can directly improve productivity by freeing up your staff’s time for other activities, ensuring that your important staff aren’t stuck fiddling with preference settings or unblocking paper jams when more critical tasks are calling. With a managed solution, you can enjoy central control over an entire estate. This is important as preference settings are very rarely optimal and small additional costs add up quickly. From an environmental perspective, the right MPS can reduce paper waste and carbon footprint as well as overall spend.

Often the problems of having a mixed, multi-vendor fleet can further complicate the issue of evaluating print costs, with many different devices running at different consumption levels making it almost impossible to pin down the average cost of a printer within the fleet. Barron McCann can rationalise a printer fleet, ensuring that only the most efficient and best-suited devices are used.

Managed Print Solutions also have two substantial benefits not related to the money they can save: they offer greater security, making pull printing safer and easier to control, and they are effective in building toward tackling paper-to-digital workflow efficiency through data analysis to properly understand how paper is used in the modern business world.

If you have printing security concerns, if your estate is ageing and in need of a refresh, if you’re worried about the environmental impact of your printing activities and above all if you want to get back control over your printing costs and ultimately reduce spend across your entire estate, Managed Print Solutions is certainly a solution worth looking at.

[1] http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/managed-print-services-market.html

By Kevin Meredith – Service & Account Development Manager, Barron McCann