Few people think about printing as part of a Digital Transformation effort. Here’s why you should. #managedprint #digitaltransformation
The Impact of Digital Transformation on Printing
Increasing customer value by rethinking your print environment
When business leaders talk about Digital Transformation, they often talk about the kind of technologies that generate headlines, like AI, block chain, or predictive analytics. But often the most important transformations feature technologies that rarely make headlines, technologies that most employees use every day. Like printers.
While printing behavior has changed dramatically in recent years, few businesses are getting close to going paperless. From contracts to marketing and sales materials, printed materials remain an essential part of the daily workflow for many businesses. And, like other technologies, printing devices and materials are constantly being improved by manufacturers to incorporate new security features, new networking protocols and new data access and reporting capabilities. Just keeping pace with the changes and opportunities that impact your business can be challenging enough, but Digital Transformation challenges us all to do more.
How Print Network Improvements Deliver Customer Value
If "Digital Transformation" seems like a vague idea, you're not alone. People have used it to mean anything from "moving to the cloud" to deploying whatever the latest and greatest technology is that's being promoted for your industry. But the idea behind Digital Transformation is more fundamental than rolling out new technology. It means streamlining and updating your corporate workflows and culture to utilize technologies that improve the value delivered to customers.
Because every business is unique, Digital Transformation is unique to every business. Depending on how your business uses print in your daily workflows, Digital Transformation for print can generate value in several ways.
1. Streamlining business workflows to serve customers faster. Business processes that rely on print often also rely on distributing printed materials to stakeholders and decision-makers, which takes time. Modern print systems can be leveraged to send print jobs to remote offices, or even just across the building, in ways that can cut decision-making or sign-off cycles by hours or even days.
2. Lower-cost color, size and premium materials. New printing inks, formats and paper types are continually improving the quality and professionalism of customer-facing products, and adding value to customer products. In the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry, for example, low-cost color printing has been shown to reduce change orders stemming from misread drawings and schematics.
3. Reducing costs that can be passed on to customers. Companies that adopt Managed Print Services are typically saving from 20-30% on the cost of printing. When these reductions in cost can be passed on to customers, you're generating value for customers, which is the heart of Digital Transformation.
4. Safeguarding customer data. It's no secret that customer data has become a high-value target for hackers, and print networks have emerged as a weak link in the corporate fire wall . If your networked printers are out of date, upgrading them to more effectively protect your customer's data is an important improvement in delivering value to your customers.
How Print Network Improvements Deliver Customer Value
If your business is growing, your business workflows around printing will inevitably change, and many of your workers will adapt to these changes in their own ways. It's not uncommon to see some workers insist on keeping a desktop printer in their own space, or funneling jobs to a favored printer rather than the one located in their work group. While these are common behaviors, they indicate that your workflows are no longer aligned with your print environment, which can lead not only to conflicts and inefficiencies, but also to unexpected security vulnerabilities.
Whenever you see these kinds of mismatches that arise from business growth, it's a good time to think about Digital Transformation to realign your business worklfows and your print environment. Managed Print Services is rapidly becoming the most effective way for growing businesses to adapt. At TIG, Managed Print Services is a methodology for systematizing optimization of your printing environment. We have a proven process to remap printing networks, consolidate devices and make it easy for users to print more efficiently. By maximizing print volume, cutting waste, and reducing draw on supplies and maintenance, we can consistently cut printing costs up to 30%.
By ensuring that print for our customers is always efficient, secure and professional in quality, we can help you achieve the kind of Digital Transformation that delivers value your own customers. To find out how we can help [email protected]