Category: Managed Print Services

In light of the largest data breach in Canadian history, you’re probably wondering, could it happen to us? How did a company expose the names, addresses, emails, logins, passwords, date of births, health card numbers, gender, phone numbers, password security questions, and lab test results of 15 million people?

A small crack led to a big break. 

That’s all it takes for your company to be faced with over a $1 billion lawsuit. Find the cracks in your organization and seal them now. We can almost guarantee there is one. It’s your office printers and MFPs, especially if you have multiple vendors providing equipment and security software.

Here’s why.

Print security begins at the device level, and you’re only as strong as your weakest link. 

Depending on the manufacturer, different security features will be built-in to the printer. HP’s enterprise devices, for example, automatically trigger a reboot in the event of suspicious activity in the BIOS, firmware, printer settings, or ongoing activity. Other OEMs have their own version of built-in software, but not all are equally robust. Best practice is to have one manufacturer and one vendor so that weaker devices don’t cause cracks and risk management is unified.   

Security patches are inefficient and costly with multiple vendors.

When an issue arises, vendors can only access and patch the devices they manage. If you call them for help with a device they do not manage, it’s unlikely they have access or certifications to properly reset the device to the optimal configuration for security. This could easily be another crack. If the source of the issue is unknown, you will undoubtedly experience finger-pointing and require additional service calls from all of your vendors. This creates inefficiency and more invoices than necessary.  

With one independent MPS expert as your partner, you get strong, unified devices and software and an accountable partner… at a lower cost! Security patches and installs are quick and easy because they can be rolled out remotely from a single management tool. Implementing fleet-wide policies doesn’t have to mean contacting dozens of providers across office locations for a weaker result.

If you want to learn more, contact us today.

Last month we looked at how a multi-vendor approach impacts employees. Today, we’ll look at how it impacts cost control.

Bringing in office technology vendors on an ad hoc basis is a common practice… but it’s not a great one. Consider the complications when hardware is sourced from 2-3 different providers, supplies from another, and service varies, especially if you have more than one office location. Instead of paying one vendor to do all of the above, you pay each of them to do a piece.

Each invoice has a processing cost. What’s your internal cost? A good average is $80 per invoice, but that’s not the only incremental cost. It’s likely not even the biggest. Consider the following:

• Are you getting standardized pricing on your equipment? Software? Supplies? Service?
• How much time do your employees spend on vendor procurement? Management? Relationship building?
• What level of buying power do you have with your vendors? Does it fluctuate? What factors contribute?
• Is market knowledge being utilized to your advantage? Who has your back at the negotiation table?

Not all office vendors are created equal. When you work with a few, you’re only as strong as your weakest link. Choose one but choose right. The best choice is someone who can negotiate standardized pricing on standardized equipment, software and services, all on your behalf through industry experience.    

Consolidating vendors isn’t just about getting the best price. You also need to reduce costs in employee time. From admin and managers to accounts payable and IT, too much time is being spent on too many vendors.  

Wouldn’t it be nice to go from dozens of monthly invoices to 1/quarter?   

The cherry on top is that when you consolidate your office technology vendors, you increase your buying power. Equipment, software, supplies, and service can be bundled and discounted for all of your locations. 

For years, we’ve helped our clients streamline vendors anywhere from 5:1 to 30:1. To find out more, contact us today.

Too many cooks in the kitchen—that’s a problem. We know how that scenario ends, right? Or, think of it this way: would you have two IT Managed Services companies managing servers on the same network? Would you have one lawn maintenance company cut your front lawn and another cut your back? This type of scenario is a longstanding problem for many companies when it comes to office printing. Traditionally, larger devices like office copiers were sold and managed by the manufacturer, and smaller network and desktop devices, by a technology reseller.  

Today, we’ll focus on how this impacts employees. 

Scenario: You want to implement a secure printing authentication system like FollowMe. 

FollowMe printing is a great way to reduce waste and improve security. Employees simply walk up to the printer they are closest to, enter a pin or tap a security badge and their print jobs appear on the device screen. Voila! Select the jobs they want to release and go. 

But you have two vendors, and that complicates things. One set of devices supports FollowMe, the other doesn’t. Or, it supports it but now one vendor wants to push its version of the software. So, you either have TWO systems working here, or some devices can’t support simple and secure printing. 

Or worse, you have one secure printing solution running on both vendors’ print hardware, and when there is a problem, you experience finger pointing. The service technicians from the organization that didn’t provide the secure print solution will likely have no idea how to connect and reconfigure it after upgrading firmware or completing a repair where they need to reset their device. 

The same is true of any software you want to implement with multiple print vendors. It just doesn’t work.

There was a time when it made sense to have multiple vendors for office printing, but today, you print less. Smaller devices are much more robust and cost-effective. Comprehensive hardware vendors like HP or Canon have machines for almost every department size or application. Independent MPS and software solutions experts can manage the whole print environment more efficiently while reducing your overall costs. 

In our next installment, we’ll look at how multiple vendors impact cost control. Stay tuned.

Are you a large organization with multiple locations nationally, internationally, or even globally?  If so, then you must be feeling the pain of managing your print infrastructure.  You’re not alone.  Many organizations are in the same situation where they find it difficult to deal with this part of the business.

Here are the top 5 challenges we typically see, along with the areas of opportunities where we can help.

Lack of global single vendor support

It’s normal for organizations to have several different vendors for various locations due to the vendor’s limitation to support nationally, internationally, or even globally.  However, as the number of vendors start to increase, so do the struggles.  This can easily turn into a logistical and financial nightmare.

Consolidating everything with a single vendor with a single SLA, enables your teams to focus more on the business, hence enabling efficiencies and growth.  Consolidating vendors will have a positive impact on your bottom line.  In addition to reducing overall cost, it will give your team significant time back so they can focus on more strategic tasks.  Many organizations have chosen to work with experts like SmartPrint who make it easier for organizations to simplify this process, resulting in significant time and cost savings across the board.

Scattered lease timelines with additional service agreements

Due to the lack of global vendor support, this results in organizations having to sign multiple leases and additional service agreements.  It can be a real challenge for companies to navigate through scattered agreement timelines, not to mention a nightmare for the finance department to align budgets.  You would constantly need to ensure that the right contracts are being reviewed with the correct vendor at the correct times.  Managing all of those renewals & negotiations is tough?  This can also lead to expired contracts, lapses in coverage, or auto renewals that may not be competitively priced; therefore, negatively impacting your business. 

SmartPrint’s 360 Print as a Service program may make sense for you.  This program is a true Print as a Service enabling organizations to combine all hardware, software solutions, supplies, and services into a single monthly fee.  You will also get the ease of flexing this program up or down based on business needs and changes.

Too much hardware

The amount of excess hardware that we typically see can be quite overwhelming.  It’s been standard practice to replace devices one-for-one when that “lease” comes up or when it’s close.  But does it make sense?  Maybe?!  We typically find that this results in a lot of inefficiencies and a significantly high cost of operating.

We can help by doing a full in-depth assessment using various tool sets to learn about the entire scope of the business when it comes to print hardware, the print related and document workflow software solutions or lack of, overall current spends, and contracts life cycle.  We will then come forward with a fully optimized future state and business case that makes sense.  This future state will include a global standardized business model and a single SLA.  Our team will then put a project implementation plan together which will include various tasks, timelines, and ownerships which will eventually enable your business to enjoy a more efficient and economical bundled delivery.  We have found that this global standard has really given back a lot of time to IT teams, specifically when it comes to managing printers. Through our recommended standards, we can deploy hardware & software that has the same look and feel globally. Imagine having a single print queue and the ability to release a print job anywhere in the world with a simple tap of an access badge or by entering a unique PIN code. Not only does this eliminate the need to IT to manage local servers at all locations, but it also strengthens security of the device, document, and data.

SLA response times + support

Believe it or not, when a printer is down, it’s really frustrating for users and slows productivity– especially when they rely on these devices for scanning workflow and faxing.  With the way the economy and changes in office printing is affecting copier manufacturers, we are finding that their response times are not being met and getting support/supplies in a timely manner can really be challenging.

We thrive on delivering excellent service levels.  This is the core focus of our business and we guarantee our response times and fleet uptime SLAs.  We have tightly integrated systems which allow service calls to be placed either via an online portal, email, or via phone.  These calls automatically flow through our ERP system and are dispatched directly to the handheld device of the primary on-site tech assigned.  These tickets can be tracked live.  Furthermore, we use toolsets to proactively monitor your print devices to predict failures and are onsite to service that device before the failure occurs.  Currently, approximately 25% of service calls are proactive and we are constantly improving that metric.

Security compliance

The big topic today.  Printers are just like computers.  Through assessments we consistently see security issues with current state print infrastructures. Organizations always have solutions in place to protect PCs, so why not do the same for printers?  Almost all of the time, print device endpoints are overlooked when it comes to meeting security compliance.

SmartPrint will recommend the best in breed devices that are not only the most secure printers in the world but are also able to be locked down automatically and managed from a single point.  This makes it super simple to get that checkmark during a compliance audit.

Our processes are tried, tested, and have helped numerous organizations streamline their efficiencies and really improved the speed and delivery of their IT teams.  By avoiding the complexities and hassles involved with multiple vendors/contracts, your business can save hours of time and thousands of dollars through vendor consolidation

Are you interested in learning more about how we can help you with vendor consolidation?  If so, please reach out.

Two years ago, a Canadian company, TIO Networks, owned by PayPal at the time, exposed the personal and financial information of over 1.6 million customers. This led to the suspension of its operations, and a permanent stain on PayPal’s reputation, even though the two were separate entities and PayPal customers were not at all affected. 

Cybercrime remains a real threat to Canadian businesses, and printers & MFPs that are more than five years old are most at risk. No matter how good your IT Department is, they can’t do it all—and they shouldn’t have to! Not in today’s world. 

If your office print equipment is managed and secured one device at a time, how long does it take to properly harden a fleet of devices when there are up to 250 potential settings to adjust on every single printer or MFP? You’re probably looking at several days of work depending on the size of your organization. That may be fine for the initial setup, but when security policies and firmware are updated, you’ll have to do it all over again… and again, as rules and employees change, or new vulnerabilities become exposed.

Your IT time is valuable and shouldn’t be used up on tasks like this. 

Without central control of your print fleet, security settings are extremely difficult to manage, and entry points for cybercrime are more easily overlooked. Your IT team is focused on configuration settings and authentication rather than working on other valuable IT projects or support. Encryption and authentication can be accomplished universally with an integrated automated security management tool. We’ve had great success with HP JetAdvantage Security Manager, but options from other OEMs also exist.  

With an automated security management tool, you can:

1. Use a single security policy for all of your devices—never secure one device at a time again!
2.  Easily add printers or MFPs to your fleet that instantly meet the requirements of your security policy with configuration settings applied automatically.
3. Meet compliance requirements with full reporting capabilities. 

Automated security management is not only a more effective way to secure your printers & MFPs, but it is also a significant timesaver that your IT Team will praise you for. It is especially powerful when combined with other print management tools in an all-inclusive agreement like SmartPrint 360. If you’re interested in learning about the best in class application of a fully integrated print infrastructure to protect your firm and save IT time, reach out, we would be happy to share! We stay up-to-date on print security so you don’t have to. 

There is sensitive information on the administrative documents printed at your office. The obvious are pages containing your employees’ salary, tax, and insurance details. Then there are medical and legal records, and benefits and severance packages to consider. The not-so-obvious are things like customer invoices including billing details, contacts and account numbers. 

That’s not all. There is sensitive information on your business documents too. Think about competitive data, upcoming project details that are under wraps, and records of large company decisions like an acquisition or buyout. It’s not just your data either. Client work is usually bound by an NDA, and there could be serious repercussions for exposing information there.

But you protect your documents with software! We’re sorry to say that your software becomes irrelevant the second a job is sent to a printer. The remaining (and overlooked) threat is pages that are left uncollected at print stations, and these account for 30% of all office printing and represent a real information risk.

So how do you protect yourself? It’s simple—don’t allow your documents to be forgotten.

What would this require?

• Users to authenticate their output before printing occurs
• The ability to implement company-wide policies that restrict “free-for-all” printing
• Works with printers from any manufacturer
• Adaptable to an existing print environment  

What would also be nice?

• Centralized control to save management time
• Tracking and reporting to understand costs
• Reduced paper waste

A print queue can do all of the above, and alleviate the risk of sensitive information being exposed. Employees can send a job from any device, but printing doesn’t start until the user authenticates it at their chosen print station. Most of our customers choose proxima ID cards, but pin-codes and other authentication methods exist as well. There is no productivity loss because new printers are so fast (between 40 and 100 pages per minute) that you aren’t waiting on jobs to finish.

There are several options when it comes to protecting your information with a secure print queue. We’ve had great success with FollowMe by Ringdale. It works especially well with print environments that have a large installed base of HP devices. If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to reach out—we’d be happy to help.  

We are very grateful to be recognized in the global top 20! A panel of industry
C-level executives, VC’s and Analysts as well as the editorial board of CIO Review selected the list of top providers. 

SmartPrint is staying on the cutting edge of software and print infrastructure solutions to complement our best in breed approach to delivering managed print services. Our SmartPrint 360  Print as a Service offering simplifies all aspects of MPS for our clients with a single bill while enabling consolidation to a single vendor.

SmartPrint has a continued focus of leading the market through our proactive approach of delivering account management, consulting, services and supplies management.

Thank you CIO Review, The Navigator for Enterprise Solutions. 

Stop Focusing on the Cost of Producing a Document and Start Thinking About the Cost of Finding It. 

Companies often focus on the cost of creating a document: how many cents per page? Should you print in color, or in black and white? As managed print specialists, we’re guilty of this too. Some might say we even obsess over it. While cost per page is important, it’s the beginning of the document lifecycle, and there’s something obvious that you probably haven’t been focused on—the cost of finding that printed page once it’s been stored. 

In order to calculate this cost for your organization, consider the following:

•   Retrieval speed
•   Number of employees involved
•   Success rate
•   Accuracy of information

Let’s look at the first two points. Just last year, full-time employees were surveyed and 49% of them said they “have trouble locating documents” (Nintex). That’s nearly half! How much time do you think is spent searching at your organization? If your employee can’t find what he/she is looking for, the logical next step is to involve a co-worker—now you’ve got two employees searching, not working. Double your cost. 

What’s worse? They aren’t always successful in retrieving said file. Your employees may come across an older version or something with missing pieces. The time it takes them to fill in the gaps only further increases your cost. Cha-ching!

Accuracy of information found should also be a concern, as 33% of employees surveyed said they “struggle with document versioning” (Nintex). How do your employees currently determine if the document they’re looking at is the latest copy? Is V3 it? Or is there are V4 they don’t know about? And who do they have to ask to get the answer? It just keeps adding up. 

Had enough? A digital transformation should be your next move.

So, what exactly is a digital transformation? In short, it’s an entirely new digital workflow that integrates with your business processes and allows your documents to seamlessly flow without disruption or delay. It is not limited like its paper counterpart—all of the above issues can be resolved with the right software and the right partner. With the help of OEMs like HP, you can have secure, automated workflow connections thanks to its open architecture.

Many organizations are already in the process of a digital transformation, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Don’t lose your competitive edge because you’re resistant to change. Take a step-by-step approach and it will make all the difference in your productivity as a company, and ultimately, your bottom line.

Contact a SmartPrint specialist today to learn more about document management integrations, and what a digital transformation could look like for your business.

You wouldn’t build a sandcastle in a hurricane, but you may have set up your print infrastructure in the same, unmanageable, way.

We get it—the printers in your office are an afterthought given the workload of projects, support and maintaining systems, if you’ve given them any thought at all. But if your infrastructure isn’t dependable, secure, and scalable, it will inevitably fail, and you’ll find yourself asking for help in one of the following situations:

• “I need tech support for an older device in the accounting department.”
• “We ran out of toner and our users are freaking out because they can’t get their work done.”
• “Our employees don’t know how to use OCR on the scanner (or even what it is!).”
• “How can I eliminate all the uncollected printouts that pile up each week?”
• “Our security has been breached, and IT security think it started at one of the old printers we have.”

The list goes on, but the problem is always the same: print infrastructure that wasn’t built for proactive management. The solution? You need these three things.

#1 Smarter Devices 

This one seems simple, and it is. Printers that have more sensors compute more data and allow you to fully understand your office print volume and service and supply needs. The components have a longer lifespan and are designed for service optimization unlike many of the devices in your current fleet (looking at you, old HP 4200/4250/4300 printers). While new equipment may sound like an expensive option, the costs may actually be much lower when you consider the above issues, especially when included in a managed print services agreement.

#2 Systems Integrations

Automated device monitoring and management requires software, and with the right integrations, you never have to think about service, supplies, or security again. Tools like Remote Technician, RMS, scanning to ERP, and DCA can significantly improve your workflow, reducing downtime and employee frustration. Integration with security software is of particular importance because most older (4+ years) office equipment is not secure, and even newer devices need regular updates to fix potential  security vulnerabilities.

#3 Scalability 

With smarter devices and system integrations, your print infrastructure becomes scalable. Standardized technology means smoother transitions and less administrative headaches as your business grows. This is especially important for employees. As they learn how to send a job to a printer, then release the job(s) when they collect them, they do not need to relearn how to do it for other printers. Employees then teach improved workflow and cost reductions to others.  

Can your current print provider manage these issues, (hint: if you are having any of the above issues, they likely cannot)? At SmartPrint, not only can we do it, we can do it anywhere you have offices in Canada the U.S. and beyond. When you implement SmartPrint 360 (Print As A Service), you automatically get the SmartPrint 360 Stack covering all of your technical print infrastructure needs.

Contact a SmartPrint 360 specialist today to get started.

You’ve heard the expression, “how many people does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” In our industry, it’s “how many vendors does it take to manage print?” Why? Many companies source their hardware from two or three different providers. Supplies often come from another source, and if a device breaks down, even more vendors enter the picture! As a result, the simple office function of printing can become a managerial nightmare for your users, IT Help Desk, and others. Multiply that across office locations and it can become a major frustration and waste of valuable time. If this is your current situation, and you don’t think there’s a problem, you should ask yourself these five questions…

1. If something goes wrong with a device or supply, who will cover the repair?
2. If you’re spending too much, who do you call to lower your costs?
3. Who makes sure the print infrastructure is up-to-date to protect against security threats?
4. How many unique invoices are you paying every month?  
5. Does it have to be this complicated?

The answer to #5: an astounding no! You could have everything covered under one bill, for one price, in all of your operating regions. 

SmartPrint 360 is an expert designed MPS solution with advanced infrastructure and high-level security that provides hardware and software to support your print volume in the most efficient and cost-effective way: the consumption model. This model covers all required hardware, software, supplies and services, and includes the page volume you need for a flat monthly fee. If your needs grow, the adjustments are taken care of for you.

You will save 30-50% on average with the best in breed standardized infrastructure. With SmartPrint’s fully integrated monitoring system, you get real-time alerts and proactive management of service and supplies, significantly reducing printer downtime. Standardizing your technology also strengthens security, which is increasingly important as print devices and software are a favourite entry point for cybercriminals.

40% of Canadian companies experienced security breaches in 2016, and 54% of those were due to unsecured printers. (IDC: Print Security – The Overlooked Threat)

SmartPrint will detect vulnerabilities in your devices and harden endpoints before infiltration. The technology is advancing, and will soon enable real-time reporting on the status of security threats. We’re on top of it, so you don’t have to be. 

Print is our business; let us help you focus on yours. Contact a SmartPrint specialist today to learn more about SmartPrint 360.