What’s the real price of inefficient printing in Professional Services?
A machine down for a few hours. A couple of people queueing for their documents. A quick repair job for one of your IT pros. For millions of professionals, they’re daily annoyances that are all too easy to write off as inconsequential, or unavoidable.
Alone, these symptoms of inefficient, outdated, or poorly-maintained print infrastructures are irritating. But together, they can quickly add up to huge productivity losses – ones that no Professional Services firm can afford to overlook.
Repair and upkeep costs are easy to keep track of, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Inefficient printing could be costing you thousands in lost time. If you want to get more time in front of your clients, focus more on value-adding work and improve operations across your business, it can’t be overlooked.
Here’s what inefficient printing is really costing your firm.
Productive time loss
Printing, scanning and document management are some of the only processes that almost every person in your firm needs to engage with at some point during their working day. They’re a part of everyone’s routine – which also means they have the potential to hold everything (and everyone) up.
If every person in a firm with 100 employees loses 10 minutes a week to print queues, downtime or other issues, that adds up to a huge 800 hours of lost productivity per year. When you’re a Professional Services firm that lives or dies by how well it serves its clients, that’s all time that could be better used communicating, collaborating and focusing on the outputs that truly matter to everyone.
Stress and frustration
That lost time isn’t welcomed by anyone – least of all the individuals getting held up by print technology. Each incident is frustrating, and brings unnecessary stress into the days of your best and brightest talent.
Fields like law and accounting can be challenging at the best of times, without introducing other sources of daily stress like troublesome printing processes into the picture. As business leaders find new ways of tackling the massive pressure employees find themselves under today, they need to look at where employee frustration is coming from. Daily annoyances like unreliable printers and scanners provide some easily solved ‘low-hanging fruit’ that can make a real difference to everyone’s working life.
Wasted energy
Inefficient print hardware doesn’t just cause long backlogs and queues, it also consumes a lot more energy than it needs to. By processing fewer documents in a longer time than modern hardware can handle, outdated hardware contributes to high IT running costs.
As businesses look for ways to cut costs while also operating more efficiently, legacy IT hardware like this will be under intense scrutiny. Not only does it cost the business a lot of money, it also has a negative environmental impact – a concern that’s only going to become more prevalent in the future.
You can find out more about the energy cost of inefficient IT here.
Wasted IT resources
In the age of digital transformation, more IT budget means more opportunities to gain competitive advantage and prepare your business for the future. If you’re wasting resources keeping an inefficient and outdated print and scanning infrastructure running, you’re wasting that budget every day.
Each individual problem might only cost a minimal amount to fix. But, over time, those costs add up – quickly surpassing what it would have cost you to modernise that infrastructure months ago.
This culture of spending less to save now, instead of solving the problems that lead to ongoing costs is seeing Professional Services firms part with their already limited IT budgets. It’s a concept we explored in our blog post Why cost control is the best way to future-proof a business.
If transformation is on your agenda, and you want the resources to do it properly, it’s worth looking at exactly how much maintaining your print infrastructure is really costing your IT department.
So, what can you do about it all?
Inefficient printing processes and infrastructure are not to be taken lightly. The costs associated with them are far more significant than many businesses realise – quickly becoming a silent drain on resources that isn’t necessarily slow.
The best way to solve it is by modernising your printing, scanning and document management environment. Whether that’s by deploying new hardware with printers or scanners, optimising the way your current environment is managed, or by moving everything to a Managed Print Services partner.
Learn more about how Managed Print Services can help you eliminate the hidden costs of inefficient printing in our Eguide, The 3 Things Professional Services Companies Really Want from Digital Transformation.
