Reduce your carbon footprint with managed print services

What are Managed Print Services for the supply chain?

Managed print services support and optimise your printing operations to work at their best.

A managed print solution includes repair and maintenance. It also covers audits of your print setup, cost control, media supplies, and more.

In this article, we explain what enterprise print management solutions are. We also discuss how they can help with digital transformation. We also discuss the benefits and the ways to use them in different industries.

How do Managed Print Services work?

Print Audit

One of the things covered by managed print services is a real time audit of your existing print infrastructure.

A managed print services specialist such as Renovotec will look at the type of print hardware and supplies that you use. We consider how often people replace parts. Finally, we review the user experiences of your employees.

Moreover, we also look at your print production process and how time consuming it is. Which includes any recurring problems that happen with print or drawbacks to these processes.

This allows us to make recommendations for cost control and even reduce your carbon footprint. Improve how you manage your devices. Simplify your current processes. Increase efficiency in using your devices and supplies.

Technology Optimisation

Maintenance and repair are an essential part of any print job. The last thing you want is productivity problems. Mechanical issues or running out of supplies can delay your work.

Help your IT teams by reducing the burden of managing extra devices. This will ensure your print processes run smoothly and cost less during downtimes.

Moreover, we offer the best-of-breed print devices from a range of leading manufacturers. These include Zebra Technologies, Honeywell, Datalogic and more. Our portfolio includes everything from high-powered enterprise printers to mobile printers, barcode printers and even RFID printers.

Management and support

Another benefit of a managed print solution is that we provide ongoing performance reporting. This gives you much more of an insight into your print processes and how they fit into your general operations.

Additionally, you can check how well your printers work over time. You can see how they can better support your business needs. All while you centralise their management under your contractor.

This will improve device management. And make it easier for you to scale your print infrastructure to match the growth of the business.

A managed print service looks at all print elements. It creates proactive solutions to keep your business running smoothly.

What are the benefits of printing solutions?

Audit your existing printer estate

Many businesses have a full overview of the devices they have in their roster, and how well they’re performing. This can often makes cost control a challenge at the best of times.

By reviewing your current printer setup, you’ll gain a better understanding of how it fits together. This helps you find ways to improve their performance.

We then use a strategy to identify any printers that are faulty or not performing optimally. This enables us to provide informed recommendations to improve performance and efficiency in your operations.

Optimise your printers

To prevent your print process from grinding to a costly halt, our print management solutions keep your printers in good shape. We regularly check their health to ensure they fit your business needs.

Based on your printing requirements, we recommend devices which will deliver higher performance while using less resources and energy. This reduces the carbon footprint of printer operations and helps align with your company ESG goals.

Reduce operating costs

Knowing your print devices and when to expect replacement parts is one way we help reduce hidden costs.

Many factors can quickly affect your cash flow. These include the hardware and the supplies needed for printing. And if any mistakes are made then that inevitably doubles those costs.

With managed print services, you combine all these costs into a single subscription. So, you can rely on a dependable recurring service that makes for a much simpler overview of operations. This will help you save money long term.

Scale your printing infrastructure

Our flexible contracts can be scaled in line with your company’s needs. Whether this is for the length of the contract, the amount of support required or even the number of devices.

You can simply add, subtract and move printers around as your business grows. This helps you manage the financing of your print service. It also makes sure the solutions fit your business needs. This also greatly improves the user experience for employees and all levels of management.

Access a rolling stock of media

Moreover, a managed print services solution includes access to a range of media to enhance your print equipment.

Running out of print media can be disastrous for your SLAs. A managed print service can remove the chance of these downtimes occurring. This is especially a risk during peak periods when it’s easy to use up more labels or ribbons than expected.

We monitor all your printers and stock levels. We also order supplies to keep your operations fully stocked. Additionally, at Renovotec, we also fully understand the importance of using the correct media in mission critical printers.

This way, you won’t have to worry about low print quality from using the wrong media and supplies.

Ongoing maintenance support

By centralising your device management, we can see how all your printers are working. This lets us triage any issues, install software updates and suggest ways to improve performance.

We also determine the quality and lifecycle of your printer components. So, you can use this information to plan ahead for these replacements.

Such as setting up and preparing orders, as well as more effectively budgeting your printing costs.

How can Managed Print Services help with cost saving?

Identify current print infrastructure

A clear understanding of your print setup helps avoid hidden costs. This also improves your ability to cost control.

Our engineers not only recommend the best printer device solutions, but also examine your existing processes. Making your printing operations better integrated and more efficient, which in turn makes them more cost-effective.

You also need to regularly check how workers use your printers. You should also adjust these processes as your operations change and grow. Consistently refining your print operations to help reduce overheads is key to a successful print operation.

Reduce wastage

Increasingly reducing waste and improving your carbon footprint is becoming more and more important to businesses.

An effective print management service gives greater visibility into your supplies usage and optimises this to reduce waste. Moreover, addressing any inefficiencies in your processes and leads to fewer errors and improved productivity overall.

This in turn means using less consumables such as ribbons and labels. It can also save energy by ensuring that users utilise printers in a more sustainable way.

Avoid capital hardware expenditure

Managed print solutions help reduce capital hardware expenditures in a variety of ways.

For a start, regular maintenance of course ensures better longevity for all your hardware devices. Fixing is often less expensive than replacing.

Moreover, we design our high-quality media to work with your printers. This helps prevent problems with the print hardware. Incompatible third-party media can cause regular print head failures.

This not only leads to higher costs from replacement parts but also from the delays in your operations because of these failures.

Included maintenance costs

Having maintenance included in a managed print service is a much less expensive alternative to requiring maintenance on a case-by-case basis.

Firstly, most providers such as Renovotec will offer a competitive rate with a contract. But also having regular maintenance avoids more expensive breakages, or even replacements, further down the line.

Moreover, while an enterprise managed print solution provides quick response times and seamless repairs, this can’t be said for one-off commissions. Which then costs the company in the extended downtime caused by the device failure.

Which industries would benefit most from an enterprise management solution?

Warehousing and the Supply Chain

Within warehousing and the supply chain printing, especially barcode printing, plays an essential role in a range of processes including:

·       Cross-docking and stocking

·       Picking and packing

·       Shipping and receiving

·       Inventory management

In an environment where you need as much uptime as possible unreadable barcodes, as a result of poor print quality, can result in extremely costly delays.

Having the right technology and support with managed print services ensures your barcodes can be scanned and processed at every stage, automating masses of information for a seamless user experience.

Manufacturing

Manufacturers must increase productivity from the plant floor to the front door. This means printing processes cannot cause delays.

In particular, Renovotec’s end-to-end thermal print technology solutions are designed to enhance a range of industry processes. Some of these include:

·       Work in process.

·       Compliance labelling

·       Parts management

·       Equipment maintenance

·       Traceability

·       Quality assurance

Our managed print services solutions are tailored to the specific needs of your plant floor, with rugged, as well as highly specialised, printing devices and print stock.

Transport & Logistics

Enterprise print management solutions can evaluate and optimise all your print infrastructure elements. Whether you require a large industrial level of demand for producing high volumes of labels, or a wide portfolio of different mobile printers being used on an ad hoc basis.

In transport and logistics, it can be particularly hard to keep track of your devices while still delivering non-stop service from the first mile to the last.

We can help with a range of processes such as:

·       Cross-docking and stocking.

·       Picking and packing

·       Shipping and receiving.

·       Inventory management

·       Proof of delivery

·       Rental car return

Retail Supply Chain

In retail you want to give your customers experiences that keep them coming back.

Whether that’s ensuring accurate pricing, quick printing for receipts or detailed product information, you don’t want low quality printing to be what creates friction in your customers’ experience.

We provide managed print solutions for a range of specialised printing from receipts to food packaging, covering processes such as:

·       Product pricing.

·       Cycle counts

·       Mobile point of sale

·       Proof of purchase

·       Gift and loyalty cards

·       ID badges

Summary

Managed print services provide a wider variety of benefits for businesses in the supply chain. Whether it’s reducing costs, improving performance or giving you more control over your print infrastructure. We ensure your printing operations are efficient, cost-effective and productive.

Contact Renovotec today to learn more our extensive Managed Print Services.