AN ELCOM SHORT BRIEFING ON PRINTER ESTATE MANAGEMENT

What are the issues?

Printers and copiers and their necessary supplies have traditionally fallen outside the remit of corporate IT teams into the “office supplies” category.  Responsibility for these products is usually split across a variety of departments, resulting in a lack of strategic product choice, a lack of priority in managing these resources, poor support & low levels of user satisfaction. 

This, despite the fact that total expenditure on printers and copiers can cost between 1% and 3% of corporate revenue (including hardware purchase, annual hardware maintenance contracts, parts, toner and paper).

What is Printer Estate Management?

The next generation of asset management software, Printer Estate Management software offers the ability to track and control printer and copier resources across the enterprise.

Printer Estate Management allows a central administrator to see printer availability, usage and the need for supplies and replacement parts for every printer and copier, whether locally or network attached, in real-time.  Running without a workstation agent, it also offers discovery and management of both SNMP and non-SNMP devices to provide an accurate register.

What are the benefits to the business user?

A business with a strong printer asset management system is able to manage their complete printer estate regardless of brand or connectivity.

Good management functionality should allow issues such as low toner, worn fuser units or drums to be dealt with before a printer fails, improving user satisfaction and increasing resource availability. A central management tool able to report printer or copier status also allows timely and cost effective purchase of supplies while reporting facilities should be able to identify % downtimes by manufacturer or specific machine.

Companies benefit through the ability to identify accurate costs per page for each unit and under or over-utilization of specific printers.

Further functionality offers reporting on usage per user or group.  Print costs can be allocated accurately to departments with separate budgets or in environments where more than one company has access to resources.

By redirecting print jobs, redistributing load and managing maintenance and sourcing of supplies centrally, most companies with 100 printers or more will see full return on their investment in printer management within nine months.  Where all print facilities are contracted out to a third party, a printer estate management suite enables the corporate customer to judge the value for money provided by the contractor.

How can Elcom help?

Elcom ITG offers printer estate auditing and management either as a regular service or as a software product.  Implemented as a regular service, Elcom is able to audit printer estates, discovering devices by name, IP address and port. 

As a software product, it can provide continuous monitoring, generating alerts and offering reports including incident details, cost utilisation and assessment, inventory and problem analysis.

For further information on how Elcom ITG can protect your business, please speak to your account manager on 01256 697222 or contact us on marketing@elcom.co.uk.