Your Printers Are Costing You

Over the past decade, my team has helped retire thousands of print servers. Print feels like an unnecessary source of panic for IT teams—a costly, high-maintenance, opaque, error-prone, and insecure activity they’d love to eliminate. Unfortunately, 63% of enterprises still say that printing is crucial to their business operations, according to the IDC. That data reveals an inconvenient truth: print is very persistent.

Though the pandemic famously catalyzed a 14% global reduction in businesses' use of print, it still persists. You can see this in the slow decline in demand for paper and the contradictory growth in the printing industry. The signs suggest that eliminating print is not likely in the near future. We can, however, address issues of complexity, manual customization, and opacity, giving IT teams printer panic.

Not all printing is created equal. It comes in two primary yet distinct forms, which persist for very different reasons. 

1. Critical system printing that has no digital alternatives 

2. End-user printing by team members who just can’t quit printing documents 

Persistent System Print

Different organizations have different names for the critical system-generated printing that their businesses run on. Depending on the organization, it may be output printing, critical printing, or system printing. Whatever you call it, it’s essential. If this printing fails or the printers go down, production stops, and your business loses money.

Examples of system printing include work orders that manufacturing employees pick up on the way to their stations at the beginning of a shift. In logistics, it’s shipping manifests and package labels. In consumer packaged goods, its product packaging—a printing growth industry projected to increase by 8% CAGR over the next 5 years. In healthcare, it’s the labels that pharmacies put on prescription bottles, as well as the ID bracelets with QR codes that hospitals use to identify patients and more. System print by any name is essential. 

Huge enterprise systems, such as ERP or CRM software, manage the processes that culminate in system output, but they do not manage the printing itself. To do that, enterprises often have custom scripts or GPOs they use to connect the ERP to another custom-built printer management solution, or a direct IP connection. Alternatively, businesses may outsource their output management to an independent provider. These options are complex, opaque, and error-prone, making them a significant source of IT trouble tickets. Any software update, printer replacement, print server addition, or cloud migration risks breaking the connections. Printer downtime means the business isn’t making money. It’s no wonder IT teams experience print panic.

Print Habits Can Be Hard To Break

The furthest you can get from mission-critical system printing is end-user printing, which persists not because the business depends on it but because people do. Those people are lawyers who print out contracts to mark up in pen and ink. They’re physicians who print out patients’ test results from the electronic health records portal to review face-to-face during an office visit. And they are—surprisingly, according to many firsthand accounts from enterprise customers I talk to—the managers with a phone, tablet, and computer who still print emails to carry from one meeting to the next.

This kind of everyday end-user printing may seem easy to eliminate for the fully digital among us. In fact, it’s profoundly difficult because it’s not a technology problem. It’s a habit and behavior problem. Organizations can reengineer things to digitize their processes and remove printers from the network, and persistent printers will still find a way. One of our clients even had an enterprise employee bring a home printer into the office to plug directly into a workstation after her office eliminated the use of printers. She simply enjoyed reviewing her work on paper and found a way to do so.

The simple answer is no, not really. It was not that long ago that printing was an essential part of most enterprise workflows. For some critical printing, it still is. Enterprises should consider what print is necessary and what isn’t. Some common reasons might include: Habit (this is how they’ve always done it).

• Efficiency: Having a paper copy is easier/faster than switching screens to grab or confirm information.

• Reliability: Different systems may not always perform reliably or provide consistent access. Printing documents manually ensures that processes aren't held up.

• Safety: In high-stakes environments, like hospitals or labs, printing is necessary for speed, safety, and accuracy.  

• Security: Given heightened awareness of cybersecurity risks, people may view printed information or instructions as “safer” than constantly logging into different systems.

• Trust: Maintaining a personal record of interactions or steps taken can be an integral part of the business culture.

Efforts to reduce print should start with addressing these reasons and trying to help people take a new approach, looking to: 

• Re-engineer processes. Ensure teams have the proper processes in place so they can adopt a digital way of working while still maintaining the same level of quality. If you have already tried that, try again by giving the people doing the work a say. Make efforts to reduce print collaborative, not punitive.

• Reassess reliability and access. People need to feel like they can access the information they need to succeed at their jobs. Ensure that application access protocols are up-to-date and that your organization’s networks operate at the required level without spinning and lag time.

• Fix your culture. Understand why people who document every action feel like they need to. Was that part of the process in the past? Is there a finger-pointing culture? Understand the root cause so you can address it.

In addition to addressing the behavioral and cultural issues that cause persistent print, modernize your technology.

Given their differences, many organizations have separate solutions to manage their system and end-user printing needs. This introduces complexity, often without enhancing transparency. PrinterLogic’s cloud-native, centralized platform manages system and end-user print from one console. It creates a direct IP printer environment that is simple to deploy and manage, and is more transparent, more secure, and less error-prone than the typical custom print management approaches.

It calms printer panic by helping enterprises:

Easily deploy one system. You don’t need separate print management solutions for your end-user and critical printing needs. By using one print management solution that is easy to deploy and easy to manage, enterprises can streamline software costs, support, predictive maintenance, and IT support with a single system that handles both types.

Leverage prebuilt interfaces. No more custom scripts or home-built connections between your print environment and your enterprise solutions. Vasion integrates with all the major enterprise software solutions, including ERP, CRM, and EHR systems.

Support a hybrid work environment. Serve the various needs of your workers. From those who are 100% on-site to those who only show up two days a week, to mobile workers who move to different offices, they can all access printing resources while you protect your network security.

Leverage AI to automate workflows without interfering with print outputs. Your print management solution should not interfere with your ability to automate processes. Enterprises can deploy AI and trust that the output management functionality in Vasion will reliably route outputs to the right printer in the right format.

Keep printed documents secure and information private. The present-day automation and AI hype have put all eyes on cybersecurity. Yet you still need to secure paper with private information on it. Access and activate advanced security features, such as release features that hold print jobs until the sender authorizes them, so paper does not sit at the machine open to view.

Gain a comprehensive view. The output console gives IT personnel and business users full visibility into the printer environment, as well as advanced reporting that can help inform ways to improve processes and implement restrictions. 

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