I think we all know now that remote and hybrid working is here to stay, and that print volumes in most sectors will not return to pre-covid levels, apart from a few notable exceptions (education for example). Many organisations have used this opportunity to review their processes and look at ways to achieve digital transformation.
At Intuitive our view is that resellers will need to adapt their products and services to offer solutions that are relevant to meet today’s challenges.
This means that print resellers need to evolve their business to replace this revenue, and fast. But where do MPS providers start?
For many organisations looking to reduce costs and drive efficiency throughout their business processes then digital transformation solutions will be key. We believe that this will be one of the big growth areas over the next 2-3 years, driven by the change in the workplace post-covid and a shortage of employees. In order to address these issues organisations need to look at the following initiatives:
Companies need to be able to offer employees more flexibility in order to retain them, including flexible working patterns and hybrid working. This in turn drives the transformation to digital enabled workplace infrastructure.
By automating routine administrative processes, organisations can drive efficiency, achieve better compliance, improve both customer and employee engagement.
But how do you spot these opportunities? At Intuitive, we believe that print analytics is the key to unlocking these opportunities for digital transformation. After all, paper is simply a part of a business process, be it a form, invoice or holiday request. If you can spot high volumes of documents that are being scanned or printed, and by whom, these can help to identify where a digital workflow could be used instead.
Most organisations who have implemented a print management system, have a wealth of historical information which can be used to identify opportunities for digitisation. The issue is that there is so much information, it can be impossible to analyse the information without a large amount of effort. Intuitive have adopted an approach that allows our partners to identify key trends in a matter of a few minutes. Key areas of analysis include:
In many organisations, the print infrastructure is not full optimised. For example, are large print jobs being printed on desktop printers where it would be most cost effective to route them to a department printer or print room? Once the issues have been identified additional rules can me quickly configured to eliminate the problem.
Are you able to analyse if a particular department have a higher cost profile per employee than another department? Once high usage departments have been identified, it is possible to look at the volumes in relation to the business cycle. For example, do all departments have the same peaks of usage across the business cycle or do they differ and what are the underlying reasons?
Do different users within the same department have different printing peaks and cost profiles and what is the underlying impact of this? Further more detailed analysis can be undertaken by combining the print data with HR data to analyse by job role across offices and spot patterns and areas for digitisation.
Scanning can quite often be an indication of the start of a business process. This can be related back to organisational and user analytics. Further insight can be gained looking at the relationship of scanning data to printed data over time.
Documents are probably the largest form of intelligence when looking at opportunities for process automation. Examples include:
While print analytics is at the early stages of its lifecycle development, huge opportunities will start to become uncovered with the move of print management applications to the cloud and the ability to perform cross organisational analytics and benchmarking.
If you want to find out more how Print Analytics can be used to uncover opportunities for digital transformation for your customers, please get in touch with us or your nearest Authorised Solution Centre today.
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