The Datamax Thinking Blog

Even electronic documents can be lost if you don’t take the time to ensure an effective workflow and index the documents for future retrieval.

Moving documents through your office and getting them to the right people at the right time so that decisions can be made (and invoices paid!) is important. 

It’s also easy for documents to go astray. Paper documents placed on someone’s desk could quickly end up at the bottom of a stack, never to be seen again. A sensitive document printed to the color copier down the hall could be accidentally picked up by a co-worker – and could even be a privacy or other compliance breach depending on the level of personally identifiable information contained in the document. 

Even electronic documents can be lost if you don’t take the time to ensure an effective workflow and index the documents for future retrieval. 

With print rules, you can establish different rules for different roles within your office so that they can meet their legitimate printing needs.

As we interact with information more and more online (PC, tablets, and phones); we still need to print documents to paper. The question becomes not if you need to print, but how do you print documents to:

• Improve print efficiency – and productivity of employees
• Save money
• Meet any green initiatives

Printing rules, combined with an office-wide print strategy and policy, will help you achieve all three of those goals. Printing rules are based on conditions and consequences and designed to create effective user printing behavior. These rules are set using print management software. With print rules, you can establish different rules for different roles within your office so that they can meet their legitimate printing needs.

Not everyone needs to understand the intricacies of how to do everything on the equipment, but understanding the capabilities of the office copier(s) could save money.

Everyone in your office knows how to use the copier, right? 

If you mean do they know enough to copy a document or print to the copier or printer, then you’re right. 

But . . .

Is your partner strategic or tactical? You want a partner who keeps on top of changing technology trends and can adapt new technology and strategies to help you succeed in the future.

Pursuing a managed print services strategy with an office equipment provider is a big investment in time and money. It’s critical that you take the time to ask the right questions of your potential partner – and that they give you honest answers!

We already wrote about seven critical questions a few weeks ago (Crucial Questions to Ask Your Next Equipment Provider, Part 1); here’s part 2.

Tips for getting the most out of meetings – quickly – so you can get back to work.

I can’t think of anyone who really likes meetings, except for those annoying folks who like to sound off in front on an audience. Plus, do we really NEED those donuts?

One reason many meetings are horrible: half of the participants aren’t fully “there.” Someone is texting to figure out car pooling their kids to soccer practice. Someone else is checking email. People are horrible multitaskers (and even your multifunction printer only prints one job at a time). Take a hint from your copier – perform many tasks, but only perform one task at a time. To get the most of meetings, this is an important idea to take and use – focus on the meeting.

Your managed print service provider (we prefer to think of this as managed services “partner”) can help show you ways to reduce your printing costs.

Here’s what managed print services is in a nutshell:

You pay for a set number of prints and copies per month (and a pre-determined fee for anything over that set number) from equipment managed by your partner.

For most contracts, you supply paper and staples. The mix of copiers, multifunction printers, printers, and/or fax machines and software to track and manage the printing and copying is supplied by your partner. Printing costs are rarely tracked, but these costs eat into your bottom line. By exposing the costs of printing, you improve your budget AND productivity by printing only what you really need.

There are no stupid questions (though we’ve all heard some stupid answers before!).

When it comes to deciding who to partner with for your copier and other office equipment – whether for purchase, lease, and/or maintenance – asking questions is an important part of the selection process. Truthfully, looking at companies that sell copiers and selecting the right partner can make or break how effective your technology purchase, lease, and/or software implementation will be.

We’ve put together a short list of questions to help you separate the contenders from the pretenders.

Even if you're not interested in the positive environmental impacts; most of these tips will help you save money and/or become more productive too.

It’s not easy being green.

We all know Kermit the Frog’s lament, “It’s not easy being green.” While I can’t relate to the struggles of a small amphibian (and there aren’t any Martians around to ask), we’ll have to take Kermit at his word.

As mobile computing outpaces traditional PC computing, the need to print from any device at any time will become more important.

The biggest barrier to printing from mobile devices, according to research from InfoTrends, is “technical connectivity problems to the printer.”

Many office workers don’t print from their mobile devices because they don’t think they can.

What if I were to tell you that’s not actually a problem? As everyone says these days, there’s an app for that – at least in the business world. There’s an app for printing from smartphone devices. A quick caveat here; for personal printing at home, connectivity and printer support does vary widely. That said, for office workers wanting to increase productivity by printing needed documents directly from phone or tablet, you can. After all, as work becomes un-tethered from a specific office location (and location within the office), not everyone will have immediate access to a networked PC and printer.

When it comes to your various information technology, document output, and internal network needs; are you still trying to do it yourself? Is your IT deck wobbling?

You’re fired!

And thank goodness for it! Network services management is way more challenging than anyone thinks it really is, but you already know that, don’t you?

One truism that I find in life is that no matter how easy something looks on the surface; it’s almost always at least twice as difficult to actually do (and twice as difficult is just for starters). This is especially true when it comes to things we actually can do.