Physical documents still play a very important role for employees and businesses, so it is crucial for organisations to manage ongoing costs, workflow and efficiency.
Research from Epson in April 2016 showed that the overall demand for printing is steadily declining, however, colour printing is increasing, and these costs, therefore, need to be managed more closely. One common way that companies have controlled cost has been through the centralisation of colour printing.
In order to better manage costs and inefficiencies, many organisations choose to use centralised print devices to drive print jobs away from departmental and personal printers. By using centralised devices, businesses are able to manage both cost and performance much more closely and gain a better understanding of their organisation’s print activities.
However, it can run the risk of losing overall staff productivity as a result of the workflow interruptions from employees having to travel back and forth from their desks to the centralised machine to collect their documents.
According to research by the University of California, it takes around 23 minutes for employees to get back to into their workflow after interruptions. If that figure is multiplied across every employee in an organisation, every time they have a need to print, you can understand the dramatic loss of productivity that a centralised print solution can cause.
Unless companies have installed automatic software solutions to manage user authentication, security and document control, the risk of confidential or sensitive information being lost, stolen or mislaid is very real.
Despite the digitisation of business today and many offices who are trying to go “paperless”, most organisations continue to rely on paper copies of documents. Printed information forms a fundamental workflow area where simply doing away with it altogether is not an option.
Centralisation is not always the ideal solution for every workplace. While it may be right for some, a more balanced solution containing a distributed, localised print fleet can help businesses save money and boost productivity.