Managed print services are services that an outside provider will offer to their customers to help them identify and actively manage and optimize their company's print fleet and document input and output. By providing these services to your customers, you can help them save money on their printing, understand their total cost of printing, reduce their environmental impact, and provide them with the security and tools they need to control their print environment. These services can benefit you by allowing you to provide your customers with additional services they need and ensure they are utilizing your products and services to maintain their print environment.

Managed print services can be used as a way to help your client free up time and resources they would use maintaining them with internal personnel in their own company and outsource them to your business who has better knowledge of how to make a print environment more efficient. MPS programs are often agreements based on a fee per the number of pages output or the number of devices that are managed. These agreements will include supplies and consumables, parts, and maintenance.

Managed Print Services Software

Managed print services software will utilize various applications to help analyze your customers print fleet and provide monitoring so that you can stay on top of supply and service needs and provide insight into ways your customers can keep their print fleet as efficient as possible. Managed print services software often includes four primary components.

• Print Management - This involves managing the type of printing that occurs as well as the print volume.
• Device Management - The software will track and manage each individual device in your print environment.
• Discovery - Through this portion of the software, you can investigate the print environment find ways to improve efficiency and suggest implementation.
• Imaging - MPS software will allow you to provide your customers with the ability to mange and securely store scanned documents so that they are easy to retrieve.

What Are the Components of Managed Print Services?

There are three primary components that are included in managed print services. These components include:

Needs Assessment

One of the most important components of MPS is providing your customers with an assessment of their needs. This is particularly vital to businesses who have never used managed print services and may be unaware of what their print environment is costing them. When you assess your customer's printing needs, you will be looking at:

• All of the pages printed and scanned by workers both onsite and remotely.
• Analysing the output of desktop printers, multi-function devices, copiers, fax machines, and scanners.
• Technical service and maintenance that the print fleet may require.
• The status of consumables such as toner and maintenance kits.

Selection and Replacement of Hardware

Managed print services include making assessments about all the devices that make up your customer's print fleet. Once you have analyzed the information, you can discuss with your client which printers and devices are performing poorly and should be eliminated or where they can consolidate some printing to reduce the number of devices in their fleet. 

Supplies and Maintenance

Once the hardware has been put in place, and monitoring has begun occurring, you will be notified when your customers are low on consumables such as toner and maintenance kits, and be able to send them to them before they are out or use an automated supplies management system to automatically send the supply at the desired thresholds. Additionally, you will receive notification when maintenance or services are needed on various machines to be able to address the problem when it is small and reduce their amount of downtime your customer will experience.

What Providing Great Managed Print Services Entails

Providing your customers with managed print services is a great first step to helping provide them with valuable services and provide them with overall cost savings to the environment. To make sure your customers see the value in managed print services and set yourself out from the competition your managed print services should go above and beyond the standard services by:

• Providing suggestions to help them optimize their print environment.
• Providing a roadmap of your customers print environment so that they can see deficiencies and inefficiencies.
• Helping them create a print policy for the user to adhere to.
• Identifying problems before they occur such as supply and service needs.Reducing your customer's environmental footprint.
• Providing a secure print environment for remote workers.
• Providing network management and IT services for your customer's printers.

Managed print services is a way for your customers to see the big picture in their print environment, use the information to make necessary changes to improve efficiency,. and provide them with the service they need to remain a loyal customer for years to come.