“A fundamental shift has occurred, however, in the way MPS is perceived in the market,” Naryan says. “It's no longer about services that you buy bundled with hardware; it’s hardware that comes bundled as a services offering. It is a cost management solution, that is able to provide a predictable OpEx (operational expenditure) model for the end user.”
A managed print service enables the company to replace existing printers with a view to implement a more controlled system which provides granular reporting, down to who printed what, when and how much colour they used. Assumptions of control aside, though, the end result is, ideally, a highly managed printing environment where the waste is cut out.
While some analysts suggest companies with at least 100 employees should consider adopting MPS, others find a low-level managed service can make improvements in any organisation albeit in different orders of magnitude. The ultimate benefits of a managed service will ultimately change based on how extensive the implementation and the size of the contract.
(Managed print customers stick with the basics)
Some may prefer to see it as a loss of management and subsequently responsibility over printing within the organisation, but others will naturally be wont to forgo the full “valet” service in favour of a slightly managed approach. For Ben Knappstein of Burnside War Memorial Hospital, the ability to implement device-agnostic print monitoring software allowed him to scale a roll out of Kyocera Mita printers while looking to gradually implement printing restrictions as he saw fit, even past the length of his current contract.
“We’re trying to achieve a further 10 per cent [reduction] in printing over the next 12 months and we’ve put some restrictions in place to achieve that and so far it’s looking pretty good,” he says. “Printing is now visible to each user; there’s a little widget that sits on each user’s computer that shows their print usage so they can monitor it and we have set up pop-up alerts when users attempt to print a job either in colour or simplex mode. They can override those alerts obviously, but there is now an end user focus on responsible printing and printing costs.”
Vendors are seemingly more than happy to implement an open, rather than closed, system based entirely around their portfolio of products. Rivals HP and Canon even have a long-standing relationship in the space which sees products from both companies offered to customers along with managed services. It is ultimately about fitting service to device to reach optimal efficiencies, and of course, to outsource those aspects that aren’t particularly appealing to IT staff.
Warming up
If there’s one piece of advice successful MPS customers have for those looking to get into the game, it’s around preparation and planning.
“We had the planning, time and the development of the contract and statement of works so both parties clearly knew what they were supposed to do and if something was grey there was a process to ‘un-grey it’, and that made it a pleasure to work on,” Allens Arthur Robinson’s McGrath says.
The lack of preparation, however, can lead to unforeseen problems, and unaccounted-for increases in rollout time.
“It wasn’t until we were about 80 per cent through our process that we realised we were gong to have a problem,” says John Gilmore, project team lead of shared services at Western Australian roadside assistance and insurance group, RAC.
It's no longer about services that you buy bundled with hardware; it’s hardware that comes bundled as a services offering.
Though he found the company’s Canon-based MPS implementation fairly early, they discovered during the rollout that the devices and back-end infrastructure being implemented wouldn’t be compatible with the Oracle financial systems the company relied on. The issue - a make or break one for the company’s accounting department - required a database analyst to reset hardcoded parameters each time to enable printing; hardly a workable solution.
“If we could have anticipated that problem we might have been able to take a week or so off the length of that project,” he says.
A solution was ultimately found in the form of middleware that wouldn’t significantly alter implementation or existing systems, but the lack of preparation in the first instance was ultimately to blame.
Proper preparation, according to IDC’s Naryan, must focus around clear communication with the chosen vendor, concrete service level agreements and a deep understanding of how the company’s existing systems would integrate with the planned services. Internally establishing key performance indicators for reductions in cost, environmental impact and paper use ahead of implementation would also likely determine whether the vendor’s supplied monitoring software would be suitable or whether additional systems are required to ensure those are met.