A print management service is a solution offered by a print management company, such as Panacea, where all your printing costs, printing maintenance and consumables are covered by a set fee, usually a price per print.

If you have high printing costs or an ageing fleet of printers which were around with Windows XP, then it probably safe to say it’s time to replace inefficient or unfit devices, which could help reduce paper and consumable costs and improve productivity.

The great thing about opting for a print management service is it will help reduce capital expenditure and improve cash flow, because you will be leasing your multifunctional printers and monthly print costs become visible.

Is your business document driven? In other words, do most of your working processes need documents or use documents?

Let’s not kid around here, 99.999% of businesses work with documents one way or the other.

According to Xerox, 40 – 60% of IT help desk calls are related to printing and document management.

Now, that’s a huge chunk of issues you could outsource to a Print Management Company to free up your IT department

A print management company can also help your business streamline document driven processes and improve productivity. You will be able to see and review departments and personnel, it will immediately highlight who is using up more resources than is considered reasonable (paper and other consumables) so they can be corrected, saving your company money.

If a document doesn’t need to be printed and it needs to be securely stored or recorded, Print Management services can include helping you automate tasks in your package. For example; the exciting task of scanning documents and saving them to digital files. Instead of saving these importation documents to your desktop and then copying and pasting them to their relevant folders, a Print Management company can train you to set up ‘preset digital workflows’* using your multi-functional printer / photocopier to cut this dull, laborious job by over half the time.

If your photocopier isn’t printing or your multi-functional printer isn’t scanning due to an error, there will be no need for your company to have long down time waiting for these malfunctions to be repaired or having to go to the expensive of purchasing a replacement these are covered under your print management service agreement*.

So, in a nutshell, if you spend a huge amount of money and time on printing or scanning documents you should seriously consider a print management service. This could also help your company to reduce its environmental footprint.

*Preset digital workflows is an automated way of routing your scanned files into their folders and repositories using an app on your multi-functional copier.

*This will depend on your print management services package – Take at our post on leasing vs buying your photocopiers .

The office photocopier is an incredible machine which has saved the world billions of man-hours, what did we do before this brilliant machine?

There were four copying solutions when Chester Carlson from Seattle invented the photocopier process called electro-photography in 1937, renaming to Xerography in 1938.

These copying solutions were…

• Carbon Copying
• Copying by hand
• Pictures
• Mimeograph

Whilst working in New York, Chester was shocked to see how many man-hours were wasted copying documents.

Having graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a degree in Physics, plus earning a law degree in New York, our hero Chester Carlson, set to work coming up with a more practical way of producing many copies of a document from simply pushing a button.

Having produced white papers on how this machine could work he approached many companies who crazily turned his invention down.

Xerox Was Born

It wasn’t until 22 Years after he’d invented Xerography that the first push button automated photocopier, called Copyflo, was produced. 

Quite rightly, the Haloid* Xerox photocopier called Copyflo became a huge success and the turnover grew from $2 million dollars in 1960 to $22 million dollars in 1963!

In 1955 Haloid, a photo paper manufacturer, helped Chester create CopyFlo. The company was originally called Haloid Xerox but shortened the name to Xerox when they floated on the New York stock exchange.

In the 1970s and 1980s the market was flooded with photocopying manufacturers which included Toshiba, Sharp and Kyocera.

Your humble and now highly advanced photocopiers sit in the office, churning out copies of important documents with ease and is sometimes a humorous prop at the Christmas party (I am sure Chester would be turning in his grave knowing what was photocopied at the Christmas parties). It took quite a journey to become one of the best office-based inventions of the last century, only the PC and the telephone have had a bigger impact on office life.

These days you don’t even need to buy a photocopier, you can also lease them at a low set price, see our post on the Leasing Vs Buying a photocopier.

If you’re looking to buy or lease a photocopier for your office or business, please call the Panacea sales team on 01432 360229.