It’s 2017. The world is fast moving into a digital age whereby everything is done on a smart device of some sort and you can potentially boil the kettle with your phone.

Printing isn’t exempt from this change - we’ve already come a long way to have smarter MFDs and printing devices that allow authorisation to be put in place and ink and paper levels to be monitored from a different site entirely.

Managed Print Services is a necessity for many organisations to ensure the smooth running of a business operation that nearly everyone relies on.

But are we actually taking printing seriously? And if not, is it time to do so?

Printing is too often written off as a necessary cost to the business with an attitude that it costs what it costs - if someone needs to print something, then so be it. Of course, most businesses aren’t quite as blase as this and do look at the cost of printing in some form or another, but what do they do about it?

Is it as simple as telling everyone they should print in mono to cut the cost, or is there a reason to believe print management and printing can actually lead to a return on investment and smarter business decisions?

Like any business function, printing has analytics that can help you make smarter decisions and understand where the costs are coming from. The issue is, not everyone is making the most out of these analytics.

Let’s assume that right now, you can’t see how many print jobs are being deleted from the system because they’re never actually printed. It’s surprisingly common for employees to print a document and never pick it up and without follow-me printing in place (to stop documents being printed without authorisation), you could be wasting money on print-outs that get binned.

For one company, print analytics showed them how much they were saving with their print management solution. The savings from deleted jobs in one month alone was £25,000 i.e. if the print management system wasn’t in place and these jobs had been printed but never collected.

That £25,000 saving can then be associated with the cost of MPS and shows the ROI for that one month, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

With the help of user analytics, we’ve seen all sorts of documents being printed by a single user that they shouldn’t have been printing, although, the most interesting one had to be an aspiring writer printing multiple copies of their manuscript for family and friends!

Taking print seriously and seeing it as a business function can not only save money and prove ROI, but can also reduce the risk of data breaches, optimise processes and help your company be more sustainable.

Rather than thinking about how much printing costs your business, start taking it seriously, report on the costs and make smarter business decisions around digital transformation and heavy printing processes that could be optimised.

We have the tools to help you do it, so if you’re unsure where to start, let us know.