Top Five Reasons To Use Follow-Me Printing for Your Business

When it comes to managing your office, there’s likely a never-ending list of things on the list to improve efficiency, save money, and ensure your office team is able to complete their job to the best of their ability. One often overlooked area is your printer strategy and document management. Have you considered how wasteful printing practices can impact your bottom line? Or have you considered the impact of your current management strategy on data protection? Do you find your IT team is often tied up resolving low-level printer issues? Luckily, there is a printing solution available that will help support your business across all these areas, and it’s called Follow-me.

What Is Follow-me Printing?

Follow-me printing is a complete document management solution that can have huge impacts on your business. It works with any printer manufacturer, and focuses on waste reduction, security, and increased productivity. While the implementation of a document management solution can have numerous benefits for your business, such as space saving, regulatory compliance, and disaster recovery, Follow-me offers several unique benefits over other services that will help you leverage your investment to best support your business.

Here, we’ll break down the top five benefits of Follow-me printing, and how Integr8 can get you on the right path with your document management system. These include waste management, data protection, usage reporting, mobile capabilities, and reduced IT infrastructure. Let’s explore these in more detail below.

Top 5 Benefits of Follow-Me Printing

1. Waste Management

In today’s business environment, sustainability has become an increasingly important key performance indicator and adds greater value for shareholders. It can also make a significant impact on your bottom line, if correctly leveraged. One of the main benefits and features of Follow-me printing is its waste management capabilities and in turn, cost reduction.

While a printer is typically a long term investment, the cost of paper, ink, and toner can easily add up and increase your office expenses over time. With an average 10 000 pages printed per employee per year, an estimated 17 percent are considered waste or unnecessary. With Follow-me printing you can regulate company printing policies, such as limiting colour printing or enabling double-sided printing and reduce unnecessary waste by making employees authenticate their requests before printing. Ultimately, this can lead to cost reductions of up to 60%, simply by reducing the number of documents printed per year.

Follow-me printing allows you to merge sustainability and cost savings to better manage both your documents and office expenses.

2. Data Protection

Another primary benefit of Follow-me printing is increased data protection and security. Follow-me utilizes end-to-end security to provide you with the following benefits:

• Protect your data
• Secure multiple printers on a centralized system
• Allow sharing across multiple devices
• Offer government-grade data encryption when needed
• Restrict and regulate device access to select personnel

This added level of security ensures that your data is protected, regardless of your business, and reduces the need for costly infrastructure such as desktop printers for each employee. However, this will no doubt be a major selling point for businesses managing sensitive client data.

3. Mobile Capabilities

Unlike other print services, Follow-me enables users to print from whatever enabled device they have on hand, regardless of their location. This will fully integrate with your system to ensure accurate reporting and management, while also supporting a flexible workforce. Print requests can be processed from any mobile or tablet device, through email, web platforms, and Apple and Google Cloud Print services. Regardless of your device, location, or the like, Follow-me will enable your team to work more efficiently.

4. Usage reporting

Follow-me’s fully centralized system enables easy reporting that will monitor your waste output, cost reduction, and overall effectiveness of your document management system. It is also equipped to comply with industry regulations, where required, to standardize your reports.

The extensive reporting system can break usage data down by department, user, device, or program/application to offer both a holistic and detailed view of your management system. Reporting can be pulled from your web browser and easily downloaded or shared via email. You can also share these details with your employees to get their buy-in on the use of Follow-me and demonstrate to leadership, as well as shareholders, how it impacts your bottom line.

5. Reduce IT Infrastructure

The final benefit of Follow-me printing is a reduction in IT infrastructure and costs, though this is by no means an exhaustive list of benefits. By using a centralized system that emphasizes data protection, you reduce the need to have personal printers for each employee at their desks. This, in turn, reduces the need for additional supplies and enables your employees to be more nimble and print from their mobile devices, wherever they are.

However, when it comes to IT, infrastructure isn’t the only associated cost. IT support for printer issues is also costly, both financially and in terms of time spent. With an integrated network, employees can print from other sources if their current printer is unavailable, and there will also be fewer printers overall needing servicing. This frees up your IT support staff to focus on more high-level tasks and make better use of their time and your money.

How Integr8 Can Help Implement Follow-Me

When it comes to integrating a new document and print management system into your business, you need the very best on hand to evaluate the cost and benefit of your business. Integr8 Managed Print Services will help you determine the best system for your business, how to merge it with your existing workflows, and evaluate the impact on your bottom line.

Integr8’s experience with high-level clients such as HP and Canon, as well as their dedication to finding the best solution for you, means that you can be confident in your services and solutions. With Integr8 and Follow-me, you can reduce waste, IT costs and infrastructure, protect your data, and enable flexible workflows.

Contact us today to learn more about which solutions are right for your business and how you can integrate these into your office.