Print management problems at geographically disbursed organisations
Printers in many offices
We deal with a lot of different types of organisations, some being small, some being large, some looking for a specific printer related function, while others want to transform their entire IT infrastructure.
But there is one type of company that typically has HUGE problems with print management, and traditionally their problems have been very difficult to solve (because of the way printers are typically networked). I'm talking about companies with many locations, spread out in faraway places.
Operational control over printers
For these companies, the problems with print management are related to operational control over the printers for the IT department. The problems they have are usually:
- A non-standardised printer fleet which makes it difficult to control the inventory.
- Different printer drivers to be maintained, updated and cleaned across all locations.
- Difficult to gather information about how much is printed and what it costs - leading to a lot of waste.
- Decisions made locally about what to procure and when.
- Difficulties with scalability, setting up new offices and sites.
- Impossible to centralise control and the centralise the IT infrastructure.
- High costs for procuring and maintaining a large number of local print spool servers.
The reason that these problems exist is the following: When a company with many offices want to network their printers, they have to invest in print spool servers in each office (or deal with a high WAN load).
IT department print management problems
All of this cause huge headaches for the IT department, and often hours are spent fixing problems that shouldn't be there in the first place. Printers simply need to work, in order for the operations to continue running. And because of the geographical spread and the traditional way of networking printers, it is difficult for the IT department to formulate and execute on a company-wide print strategy.
Solving these problems is very important for companies with many offices, and doing so should be prioritised. Because with each passing month of status quo, they are wasting precious time and money, making operations in general more difficult, and being passed by competitors who have done something about this.
