How to Centralize Print Management and Reduce Costs

Effective print management offers multiple opportunities to increase efficiency and reduce costs along the way.

The trouble is that “effective” part. We all know what print management looks like using standard enterprise print solutions, and it often involves a lot of damage control. Which is anything but effective.

Sure, you can try to be proactive and auto-deploy the right printers to the right users. But Group Policy and other deployment methods aren’t super reliable. Nor are print servers for that matter. Despite your best efforts, users can still find themselves unable to print when they need to.

As a result, they call the helpdesk. That only ends up putting IT in response mode. And that’s an inefficient, expensive way to operate.

So, how do you break out of response mode and move toward effective print management? Is it impossible if your organization is large and distributed? And what are the potential cost savings—through print infrastructure reduction, for example—that justify the effort?

 

The Answer Is Simple: Centralized Print Management

By implementing a solution like PrinterLogic, centralized print management can be achieved in SMBs as well as large-scale enterprises. It doesn’t matter how they’re organized or distributed. 

As a matter of fact, PrinterLogic’s centralized print management is designed to overcome the usual hurdles of distributed and complex organizations. Which means that the more distributed they are, the more gains they’re likely to see.

Centralized print management is important because it removes the fragmentation that arises when your organization has multiple physical locations or lots of specialized departments. It simplifies things and allows IT to accomplish more with fewer resources.

In PrinterLogic’s case, it has even more advantages than your usual enterprise print solutions. Our centralized admin console allows IT to manage the entire print environment from a single pane of glass. Printers can be deployed to individuals or entire groups of end users without even touching a GPO, and drivers can be consolidated in one convenient repository.

On top of that, PrinterLogic’s serverless print infrastructure is able to eliminate print servers at the same time. Managing printers is streamlined while also creating a huge opportunity for a print infrastructure reduction.

 

Centralize Your Print Management and Cost Reductions Will Follow

It’s easy to think about print infrastructure reduction just in terms of the money it will save on hardware and licensing. And that’s not wrong. Getting rid of print servers definitely eliminates those obvious expenses.

But there are not-so-obvious cost savings bound up in that too. With print servers gone in favor of PrinterLogic’s low-footprint, high-availability print solution, you no longer spend time dealing with single points of failure, crashed spoolers, rogue print jobs, mismatched drivers and all the other headaches. Damage control becomes a thing of the past.

And you see the benefits of PrinterLogic’s centralized print management on the user side too. With reliable deployments and increased print uptime, there’s no need for them to call the helpdesk. Thanks to PrinterLogic’s self-service portal, they can easily identify and safely install printers all by themselves. That’s what effective print management looks like.

 

Yes, You Can Centralize Print Management and Reduce Costs Too

After years spent struggling with legacy enterprise print solutions, many IT professionals say, “PrinterLogic sounds perfect, but it won’t work in my company. We’re just too complex.”

Aquafin actually said something similar. They’re a large Belgian company that oversees 281 wastewater treatment plants and 1,394 pumping stations throughout the country. They were using notoriously tricky Novell IP printers across 100 corporate offices and needed something more streamlined. To them, PrinterLogic “sounded too good to be true.”

In practice, PrinterLogic did exactly what they hoped. Our serverless print infrastructure was the cornerstone of two major print-environment migrations. Ultimately Aquafin eliminated all of its print servers and enjoyed centralized print management across its 100 remote locations. You can read the full case study here.

Isn’t it high time that you centralized your print management and left yesterday’s enterprise print solutions behind as well? Start your free trial of PrinterLogic today to see how attainable effective print management can be.