The Datamax Thinking Blog

Most businesses don't know what they don't know when it comes to printing and copying.

Getting the right mix of office equipment is hard for companies. I've been writing recently about the value of assessments and how they help drive good business decisions when it comes to technology selection.

As the year winds down and another is soon to begin, now is a perfect time for thinking about your plans for next year. Do you ever sit down and think about how you could be doing things better, how you could be printing for less?

Only taking the time to plan will get your office in the shape you need it to be to do the best you can for your customers.

Do You Have Any Clue What You Need? Digital Copiers, Document Management, and Managed Networks

“Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, “What road do I take?”
The cat asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it really doesn’t matter, does it?” 
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

If you've spent any time on our website, you know we place a high value on assessments – we offer one on just about every page!

If you need to print confidential documents securely, pull printing can be your answer.

How often have you walked past a copier or printer's output tray and cringed to notice a confidential document sitting in plain view there?

When your business deals daily with documents that contain confidential or protected personal information (like law offices and medical professionals who need to be HIPAA compliant), you need a way to keep the documents that you need to print secure. Pull printing (often called follow me printing or secure print release) is one way to ensure that only the right people have access to those documents. 

uniFLOW Online (SaaS) provides the benefits of device authentication, secure follow me printing, secure mobile printing, full cost control with online reporting, and more — right from the cloud.

For many organizations, printing continues to be an enormous cost issue that remains entirely untracked and uncontrolled.  Pretty amazing since managing print output has been such a hot topic for so long.  Well, consider granting us an indulgence (and a bit of your precious time) and give us another try with another approach.

We believe finding a solution that provides practical insight into your print environment is essential. 

Rather than guessing at your document output and printing needs, your managed service partner will identify the right mix of office equipment to meet your ACTUAL printing and output needs.

Managed Print Services in a nutshell:

You pay for a set number of prints and copies per month (and a pre-determined fee for anything over that set number) from equipment managed by your partner. 

Most of us have heard this before, but it’s worth repeating because it’s true – there are no stupid questions (though we’ve all probably heard some stupid answers). 

This is especially true when asking a potential office equipment provider questions. When it comes to deciding whom to partner with for your copier and other office equipment needs – questions are an important part of the selection process.

How important? 

When looking at companies that sell copiers, selecting the right partner can really make or break how effective a technology purchase, lease, and/or software implementation will be.  Since questions are important in this process, here is a short list of them to help you separate the pretenders from the contenders.  

Use print tracking and managed print services to simplify cost recovery in your law firm.

Recouping business expenditures taken on behalf of a client (whether internal or external) is necessary. Keeping track of each of those expenses for every single client can be difficult and time consuming.

It’s sort of like traveling for business. You have that thought, “I could be reimbursed for my meals and my trips to Starbucks, but do I really feel like jumping through the necessary hoops?” Sometimes your time is just worth more than the trouble of recovering a cost.

To remain competitive businesses need to harness technology to solve their everyday challenges.

Though technology won’t solve ALL of your business problems, you might be surprised by the amount of heavy lifting it can do for you – this is especially true in a document-intensive industries, such as legal. And, with all the time you’ll gain with the help of technology, you can concentrate on one of those other tasks you’ve been juggling.

Here’s a list of common business challenges – and potential solutions to those challenges – that can make a difference in your office.

Print tracking tools help you understand where you’re incurring costs, so you can get them under control.

It’s a question we are asked often: “Can I track how much my office prints?” Office print tracking captures and records information about your office’s printing behaviors.

You can’t plan for what you can’t measure. And not knowing the total number, length, etc. of what documents are being printed and by which department and individual makes it difficult to ensure that printing costs are under control.

Learning more about how selecting the right mix of office equipment will make your life easier and save your office money is a good first step.

You can save up to 30% of your printing costs by partnering with a managed print services (MPS) provider. This is a commonly accepted and used statistic based on research from industry analyst Gartner.