How outsourcing print can help you understand your business better

Drawing on outside help can be a smart way to access cutting edge expertise for strategic initiatives, such as digital transformation, migrating to the cloud or creating a world class AI strategy.

But outsourcing isn’t just for top level projects. Choosing the right partner can make a big difference in less high profile but critically important areas, such as print. 

Afterall, print continues to play a critical role in business. Across Europe 43 percent of firms say paper documents are essential to their business processes, IDC research shows, while 28 percent cite legal requirements to retain paper documents.

Over three quarters say they need to maintain or increase printing for accounting and finance documents.  

There are good reasons then why large, and not so large, companies should pay closer attention to how they manage their print operations. Or look for a print partner to manage print for them. 

Turning to a managed print services specialist can help ITDMs tackle challenges such as security, efficiency, sustainability or compliance, which affect workers across the organisation. And it gives tech leaders a way to side-step skills shortages while reducing risk, freeing internal expertise up to focus on those higher profile transformation issues.

What to expect from a managed print service

At the same time, document printing is under scrutiny because of an increasing focus on sustainability. When printing is badly managed, resources such as energy, or paper, ink and toner can go to waste. This is a clear sustainability challenge. But this is also bad for the balance sheet and can represent a security and data protection risk.

Outsourcing or choosing a print partner can help across all these issues. However, it has often been overly focused on HQ operations, rather than looking at decentralised solutions that fit growing business needs in today’s society.  

This can open the door to a range of problems. 

Responsibility for managing and buying consumables and devices at smaller, local level can easily fall to staff with limited knowledge. At best this can mean consumables, or even devices, are bought with petty cash, meaning the company isn’t getting best value for money. More worryingly, the use of home devices or a lack of awareness of confidentiality protocols leaves open the risk of data exposure. Local staff can even end up buying no-name devices which can represent serious security risks once they are attached to the network.

That’s why trust is critical, explains Brother’s MPS manager and print expert, Phil White. “What we mean by managed print services (MPS), particularly for larger businesses, is outsourcing their print and document infrastructure to a trusted supplier across all home and office sites.”

With a modern managed print service, print and document spending comes together in a single cost centre, making costs far more visible and easier to track. But employees’ use of print resources also becomes far more transparent, and therefore manageable, whether that’s ensuring they have the right consumables at the best price or encouraging them to use print resources sustainably.

That visibility into what staff are really doing also feeds into security. When your MPS partner focuses on branches, rather than just top tier facilities, the threat of random, unapproved devices being attached to the network is erased. “And the benefit of that really is you start to get more control and it makes the solution far more secure,” says Phil.

That is an obvious concern for a business with multiple retail branches or satellite offices, but equally so for doctors’ offices or other medical facilities, where confidentiality is critical, as well as transport and logistics providers and other decentralised businesses.

And that need for trust feeds into someone looking to print out a prescription or an invoice knowing that the device is going to work, as and when it’s needed.

You need a printer, and a print partner you can trust

That’s why, when it comes to choosing a potential partner, the priority is to have a clear idea of what you really want to achieve. This isn’t about IT, says Phil. Rather, the question is “What's the business outcome you're looking for?”

From there, he says, “You need to find a partner that understands your business, that understands the outcomes that you're trying to achieve as an organisation and as an IT department, finance department, and operationally.”

Every organization is different, and a prospective provider needs to understand this, rather than simply presenting a pre-drawn template on day one. It’s important, says Phil, that “They're taking time to be truly consultative.”

Ideally, they should be helping you uncover challenges you didn’t know you had, whether that’s departmental staff paying too much for consumables or business processes being disrupted because of inefficient infrastructure. And they should be meeting you with a solution that is flexible enough to address the outcomes you’re targeting and the full range of challenges your organisation faces. 

In Brother’s case, its MPS approach is decentralised from the outset, with the underlying management infrastructure hosted in the cloud. Moreover, Phil explains, Brother recognises that different companies will have different document processing needs or preferences, so its MPS platform is agnostic regarding document management software.

“Our consultative approach is about understanding the importance of documents to a business and how they can be best aligned to a business’s goals,” he says. 

That said, customers shouldn’t be afraid to look for an MPS engagement where the service is linked to the business goals they are trying to achieve. That could even mean having penalties for service providers tied to non-achievement of a business’s goals for a solution, whether that is reducing costs or reducing document output.

No-one is going to pretend that printing gets technology leaders’ blood racing in quite the same way as AI or robotics. But while “printing” might not be considered an existential issue for an organisation, customer satisfaction, data security or improving productivity can be.

As Phil explains, “It's the value of the document that is the important thing.”

It’s clear that the best print outsourcing strategies start with open dialogue and are underpinned by trust over the long term. For a no obligation discussion about how Brother and its MPS partners can help you make the most of your print infrastructure, take a look at our managed print services.