| | AUGUST 20198CIOReviewIN MYOPINIONTHE MATURITY OF MANAGED PRINT SERVICES (MPS)Managed print services have been around for some time now and a lot has changed since they were first offered. There have been a lot of growing pains, but we are starting to see more mature offerings in the programs that are available today.About 6 years ago, we moved our company away from an in-house, hot swap depot exchange for all of our printers to a vendor specific, managed print services offering. That move revolutionized how we spent our time and managed printers and scanners within our organization. With 22 remote locations and a corporate officemanagingover 300 printing and scanning devices,we had our hands full supporting the organization. For our business, implementing a good MPS program gave us a much better way to support our needs.We found several advantages to implementing an MPS program. The biggest was the cost savings of outsourcing the labor and logistics of managing the printer fleet. While MPS programs are not in-expensive, if you have several locations that are geographically separated, there can be a significant cost savings when support, labor and logistics are factored into the cost of operating the program. Another advantage is that most MPS programs have cloud or centralized monitoring for devices that are connected. This monitoring, when configured properly, can facilitate the automatic re-order of supplies and alert teams of upcoming maintenance needs. Centralized access also facilitates fleetvisibility and management tools forconnected devices. MPS programs offer other benefits like business analytics. Centralized data capture allows for reporting on key deliverables like cost per page that go down to the device level. Many organizations struggle to find the time to utilize these features, but for those looking to reduce costs, MPS analytics can give you ways to track cost reduction initiatives relating to printing.By Steve Lee, Director, Information Systems & Communications, Rosauers Supermarkets
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