In today’s digital workplace, organisations are looking to become increasingly agile as business needs change. One key factor organisational leaders can’t ignore is their print environment and the associated costs of maintaining physical print servers. You can consolidate your IT infrastructure to increase workforce agility, while protecting your documents, data and information with an optimized print infrastructure that allows you to better engage with your digital transformation vision.
Even though every business is striving to reach its digital transformation goals, printing is still integral to some businesses. However, just because certain processes or workflows within an organisation are tied to printing information, data, contracts or forms, that doesn’t mean that the printing aspect of the business cannot be automated and made more secure.
A simple step to reduce your expenditures on multiple print servers across offices and/or geographic locations is to consolidate your print servers without compromising on efficiency or system productivity. Not only does consolidating print servers save overall operational costs, but it also helps enhance the security of your business’s overall print operations. It can also be the first step towards greater control and higher information mobility through optimised print workflows.
To avoid heavy network traffic, organisations with multiple locations need to invest considerable resources in operating and maintaining a fleet of local print servers. Single server print solutions eliminate or reduce the number of costly print servers to free your capital investment. Each dedicated print server that you remove can help you save up to $6,349[1]. Output Management reduces waste and prints only what you need with less network traffic. You could reduce print output costs by up to 30%[2] by optimising your print server infrastructure and eliminating underutilised devices.
A few solutions in the market provide you with the flexibility to scale up, regardless of how many printers you need or how many print users you want. Some also give you the ability to modify individual printer functions or add/change locations on the fly without investing in multiple print servers. A primary benefit of this consolidation effort is that you can reduce 40-60%[3][4] of the time your IT team spends on print-related support calls, allowing you to free up your IT resources to perform high-value projects and tasks.
Most optimised print server solutions also allow you to manage your printer configurations centrally, increasing security and compliance of your print workflows. 51% of employees usually print, copy or scan confidential information at work[5]. A card authentication system allows for secure print output, which eliminates the risk of documents sitting in the output tray and falling in the wrong hands. You can educate your employees to enforce best practices and maintain privacy across your entire organisation.
Reduce energy consumption, reduce paper waste and promote environment friendly user behaviour to bring positive change to the environment and your bottom line. To learn more about the benefits of optimising your print server solutions, visit Ricoh’s Server-less Print Solution.
[1] Gartner, IT Key Metrics Data 2014
[2] Gartner Report July 2013, Cost Cutting Initiatives for Office Printing
[3] Gartner, Driving the Adoption of IT Self Service, February 2010. Average # of help desk tickets is 1.2 per user, per month
[4] Nuance Communication internal help desk ticket analysis, 12 months (2013)
[5] IT/MFP Security Study, Harris Interactive, 2012
