Hate the Office Printer? Print Management Solutions That Reduce Headaches and Improve Workflow

Let’s just be honest: you hate print drivers. Everyone hates printer budgets. Print is one of those necessary evils in the business world — you love having physical information in hand, but printing costs you money, takes up space, and causes IT problems you don’t have time for.

We get it. We know you don’t want to think about it. But what if you could save a ton of time and money with a setup designed to fit your exact business needs? New technology makes it possible to gain better insights and establish faster processes than ever before. Stop letting print burden your company with hidden costs. Now is the time to understand the print management solutions that will revolutionize the way you handle scanning, printing, and faxing at your company.

What is Print Management?

Have you ever tried to manage your banking without a convenient banking app that keeps you up to speed at a glance? Spending in the dark for weeks at a time and getting surprised with the balance at the end of each month would be an awful way to do personal finances.

Yet, that’s exactly what many companies do with print.

Without print management solutions, you are flying blind. Your employees are printing, and you have no real clue how much of it is necessary and how much of it could be curbed with better practices. You get surprised each month with a bill that tells you your overages but doesn’t help you improve anything. And print is one of the leading costs for most businesses.

Print management takes this problem head-on and provides you with actionable solutions. Your custom-built print management system will help you trim the fat and automate processes to create a better printing environment for your whole team.

Print Management Solutions Makes Printing Easier

Print management looks different for every company because it’s a system specifically designed to support your processes and address your challenges. A quick, 15-minute chat helps our experts determine what features would streamline print practices for your team and give you more insight into spend. The goal of print management is to help make printing easier to manage by increasing control and visibility.

See Your Status at a Glance for Quick Insights

Remember the banking app example? You need an easily accessible dashboard that provides a quick overview of your company’s printing status. You won’t always have time to dive into granular details. Print management technology should provide insights to help you understand usage, equipment status, and alerts at a glance.

Create User-Friendly Printer Setups and Controls

The printing setup process tends to go one of two ways: it can either be extremely tedious or lack necessary security measures. Print management solutions help make backend setup simple without compromising privacy.

Print management software can help you create individual profiles and push them out quickly to your entire printer fleet. Individual setups allow automated data entry (like email addresses) for faster printing processes and accurate usage tracking.

You can also establish additional controls and defaults to help reduce accidental excess spending. For example, you can set Outlook files to print in black and white on default so text-based communications aren’t printed in full color because of one logo in the email signature.

Access Detailed Reporting to Improve Workflows

A better system will give you insights beyond a basic overview for the times when you need to take a deep dive into printing to pinpoint wasteful practices. You can look at the overarching real-time view or dial into the details. The software and setup should allow you to see who is printing — and what they are printing — at any given time.

While you might not always want to see the individual projects or printing habits of your employees, it can be helpful if you need to curb excess spending. You can also access quick reports to see things like a list of employees with the highest printing volume each week or month. This kind of information can help you make informed decisions about budgeting, workflows, and printing policies.

Pinpoint Issues with User and Project Visibility

If something goes wrong with user permissions or printer errors, print management solutions provide clear insights to help you pinpoint the issues. Reduce IT tickets by simplifying the support process. Establish alerts to instantly let the right people know what went wrong to reduce downtime or backlogs.

Avoid the Need for Phone Lines

Some business leaders don’t realize how the phasing out of phone lines will impact their current printing setup. Print management solutions can help you create a cloud-based setup that doesn’t use phone lines. You can use electronic faxing and replace your old fax machines with remote faxing capabilities that work on any laptop, tablet, Android, or iPhone.

Not only does cloud faxing make it possible to send and receive faxes on the go, but electronic faxing also makes it easier to organize and store your faxes so they are readily digitalized and available on any connected device. This switch can help reduce needless printing processes that typically occur with traditional fax.

5 Benefits of Print Management Solutions

There is a reason print management benefits get our customers so excited. No one likes managing printers — until they realize there are extremely convenient and effective solutions to help do it. Check out this list of five ways a better system can optimize your current setup.

Save Money on Print Spend

Let’s start with the obvious: you can save money on your printing process by improving print efficiency. Just look at the waste statistics:

• Half of business waste is composed of paper.
• Paper makes up 26% of all landfill waste.
• U.S. companies use 12.1 trillion sheets of paper each year.
• 45% of paper printed at work goes into the trash before the end of the day.

Getting a clear picture of how and what you print will help you consider whether your current practices are in the best interest of your company.

As you start to set guidelines and goals for your team, you can reduce the cost of printing by lowering your use of paper, toner, and ink — not to mention curbing wear and tear on your expensive office machines!

Reduce Printer Task Times

Beyond the direct monetary savings you get from reducing supplies, you can also save indirectly on manpower hours. 

Save your team time each day with a streamlined printing process. Make it faster to log onto each printer with a personalized ID code. Set alerts for things like printer errors or low toner reminders to avoid unnecessary holdups at the printer.

Plus, print management solutions can quickly set up personalized profiles that assign the right email and workstation to each employee with a printer code. This makes it faster to print from and scan to the right place without typing in a bunch of information at the printer station. 

Our solutions are customized to the challenges and needs of your business. We will help you find ways to automate your workflows to speed up the printing process at every point possible.

Lessen Miscommunications

How helpful is it really if the tech department or upper management gets every printer alert? Issues like low toner should probably go to the office manager or administrative assistant responsible for ordering toner and replacing cartridges. And alerts for high usage should go to a department head, keeping them in the loop before their team goes over budget.

Make sure the right people are getting the right printer alerts and staying on top of their print-related responsibilities. With print management solutions, you control what alerts are set, what thresholds trigger them, and where the alerts go to help improve office communication.

Eliminate Redundant Tasks

If you’ve ever felt frustrated by the incredibly redundant task of assigning employees to each individual printer, you can thank PrintNightmare. What used to be an automated part of network permissions is no longer safe, thanks to some malicious cyber attacks.

However, a great workaround to this annoying issue exists with print management solutions. One of the many benefits of optimized print management includes automation to streamline redundant tasks. We can make the onboarding, offboarding, and printer setup process fast! 

Multiply the time saved by every employee and every printer in your environment, and you’ll be glad you didn’t try to wade through the manual process!

Set an Accurate Print Budget

Finally, we can help you plan for the future. No one likes budgeting, but business leaders really like staying in the black. 

With a clear view of current spending, you can establish a better baseline to help you predict future expenses and give your company leaders a clear understanding of where the budget goes every month.

Get everyone get on the same page by setting clear expectations from the start. Define measurable goals around print management to help your team know what they are aiming for. 

It’s Time to Embrace Print: Print Management Services Can Help

A lot of smart people thought the Digital Revolution would drastically reduce paper use — they were wrong. You wouldn’t run an office without a straightforward banking app and in-depth bookkeeping system. You should have the same visibility to successfully manage print.

At UBEO, we help businesses just like you learn how to take print head-on with customized solutions. If you’re ready to see the benefits of print management solutions firsthand, we can help. Get an assessment or talk to our expert team today.