Managed print 2.0: Evolving to distributed environments, says IPS’s Jones

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John Jones, MPS solutions manager, IPS

13 November 2015

There’s no denying managed print services have been good for the end consumer, with per-page prices driven consistently downwards. But as the market has moved to this model, it seems to me we’ve started the discussion at the end rather than at the beginning. Instead of focusing on costs – which is where the conversation should naturally conclude – we believe MPS delivers better value when customers first understand the rules that govern documents in their business. Looking at MPS this way also opens it up to sectors like retail and distributed environments, whose profile is very different to the open-plan office that’s been the traditional home of managed print.

In retail scenarios, branch locations often have a single printer in the back office, so obviously the traditional MPS approach of consolidating hardware doesn’t apply. Instead, the conversation is around workflow management and there’s a compelling story to tell.

“Retailers have invested heavily in solutions like ERP, accounts, or SharePoint, and they understandably want to get information into those systems as quickly as possible without impacting on staff time to input that data”

There are two sides to printing, if you’ll forgive the pun: isolated printing sits outside all of a company’s other systems. Staff simply print and collect a sheet from the device. Integrated print has easy-to-use interactive apps that hook into various IT applications like e-mail or accounts payable. Through working more closely with our clients, it’s become increasingly clear that integration and document automation remains a challenge for them. Workflow management is the opportunity to meet this head on: a chance to reduce the number of ‘touches’ a document takes throughout an organisation on its journey from the branch to head office.

The kinds of forms you find in a typical retail environment include delivery dockets, stock checks, site maintenance, new starters, staff training, incident reports and shift rota forms. In other words, they span most areas of the business, from operations to HR. Most of these forms are printed on low-end devices, then they’re filled in, scanned and sent to e-mail.

Retailers have invested heavily in solutions like ERP, accounts, or SharePoint, and they understandably want to get information into those systems as quickly as possible without impacting on staff time to input that data, and to do so as cost-effectively as possible.

Arriving at this point involves working with retail customers to see their document policy in a more rounded way, as opposed to thinking purely about printed paper. Essentially, it’s a shift from printed output to digital input.

We believe the MPS model enables this change. It significantly reduces the amount of printing required as well as the time needed to sort the documents manually, scan them and upload them to the central system. We recently carried out a time study with one major retail customer and we estimated the savings achieved were 2-4 hours per end user per week. That’s not including time savings that can be achieved at head office, which now receives indexed, searchable and retrievable content instead of posted incomplete documentation.

With this version of managed print, each branch gets a consistent, cost-effective device that has the ability to send and retrieve forms back to head office. The multi-function device comes pre-installed with hooks into the company’s e-mail or accounts payable systems as needed.

In a retail environment, the small desktop MPF device is not so much a printer but a means for transporting important documents around a business in the most cost-effective way possible. MPS started life as a way to build a print policy for an organisation. Now, moving into the retail sector is bringing us full circle back to policies around documentation, and the potential savings that can result. It’s a message any retailer would appreciate.

 

John Jones is MPS solutions manager at IPS

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