While on a far more traditional note, he added that the past year has seen steps forward like “reliable, automatic two-sided printing and fast print speeds, up to 25 pages per minute,” helping businesses meet productivity targets while also “allowing them to print not just securely but on-the-go from smart phones, tablets, or laptops.”
Energy efficiency
For Datapac director Patrick Kickham, conversations with clients in this space during the last 12 months have quite often seen “a clear focus on energy efficiency and carbon reduction,” across the entire lifecycle of print and document management products. O’Reilly will be pleased to see that Kickham used HP’s new PageWide Technology devices as a solid example of this, using “dramatically less energy than comparable laser printers.”
Companies feel that once the MPS project was completed, the job is over. It is, the responsibility of the true MPS provider to analyse and report back to the client on trends, habits and bring new technology and ideas to the table, John Jones, IPS
Indeed, as with the HP man, Kickham noted that “security has also become a major consideration” for businesses due in no small part to the “realisation that a print device should be handled more like a server or client machine than merely an input/output device for printing documents.”
Document workflows too, said the Datapac director, have become faster and provide easier access to information from a universal desktop interface. This allows, he added, greater control over business documents, ensuring a better user experience and higher levels of productivity and customer service.
Print services spend
At the moment, Kickham told TechPro, “in terms of the overall print fleet,” Irish companies are for the most part spending “wisely” to consolidate their print environment and avail of more flexible and efficient devices. Improved functionality and reporting means a “deep dive” into costs across business units for analysis is far more straightforward and in turn affecting where money is invested as well.
Cloud-based management tools and mobile printing solutions are areas where that spend will often make sense to invest though, with Kickham noting that, in the case of mobile printing solutions, they are a necessity to “meet the demands of modern mobile working practices.” Cloud-based management tools are also seeing increasingly more investment.
Ergo’s McGarrigle weighed in, saying that organisations want to see “more transparency” when it comes to spending, “especially in print.” He claimed he’s seeing a “greater adaptation” when it comes to focusing that spend on expert consultation “that can deliver the right software solutions and hardware specifications, giving the customer more visibility, better security, greater control and ultimately assist in driving down costs.”
Elsewhere, Stanley said that “most organisations that we deal with have made the decision to centralise print management and put strategies in place aimed at tracking, managing and optimising document output on an organisation-wide scale.” They are, he added, also focused on reducing the total cost of ownership of the entire print and document output fleet.
“Typically this will mean removing many of the older and inefficient devices and replacing these with a smaller number of MFDs. Ultimately, they want to improve fleet uptime, increase employee productivity and improve document security,” he added.
Document workflows have become faster and provide easier access to information from a universal desktop interface. This allows greater control over business documents, ensuring a better user experience and higher levels of productivity and customer service, Patrick Kickham, Datapac
Industries
Of course, no matter how realistic it genuinely is, the promise of a paperless office something that has been in the offing for some time, and for some industries indeed it’s likely almost a reality. From a client standpoint, the backbone though of the print services sector, said O’Reilly is “amongst others”, large enterprises in the financial, pharmaceutical, logistics and manufacturing sectors. “They’re the ones with a focus on benefitting from an MPS solution,” he said.
“This is due, in part, to the proliferation of devices and access points that now collect, transmit and store this data. This web of machines and connection points, needs to be kept secure at all times and it is only by maintaining this fortress that organisations can remain compliant. MPS is particularly important for the financial and legal sectors where the confidentiality of information is paramount,” said O’Reilly.
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