Do you need to address out of control costs associated with network printing. Print Fleet Management allows dealers to gather information on a client’s fleet and identify where printing dollars can be saved. A printer fleet management tool offers a competitive advantage by providing a detailed composite of the enterprise printer fleet with inventory sorting; print and cost history trends; usage comparisons; and problem history. These are the best practices for managed print services:

1. Develop a Print Strategy
Best practices conclude that fleet assessment and strategy development should be hardware vendor independent.

2. Establish a Baseline
The baseline assessment is used as the kick-off point for developing the corporate print strategy. During baseline assessment, best practices incorporate all costs into the picture, not just consumables – the largest cost being human resources.

3. Treat Printers as an Asset
Best practices recognize that the printer fleet is a corporate asset, and thus, should be managed like any other IT asset. Printer asset management looks at a device through its lifecycle and the fleet from the enterprise perspective. A printer life encompasses purchase decisions, printer financials, maintenance, supplies management, and retirement. The enterprise perspective looks at the fleet inventory using corporate metrics, comparisons and trends, making decisions from a global, rather than, unit or commodity basis.

4. Reduce
The direction of managed print services is to reduce total costs; the amount of printing; the number of devices; the number of manufacturers and models; and to reduce the number of vendors.

5. Automate
Managing print services in a cost effective manner requires automation of many of the processes involved. The printer fleet management tool should automate service requests in the event of a device alert or toner request, maintenance reminders, device retirement and replacement and scheduled reports.

6. Manage Desktop Printers
They tend to be underutilized and supplies are expensive and complex to track and manage. If the print strategy permits desktop printers, they should be restricted to a limited number of models and be network attached to make them visible to the network.