For many businesses, everyday print issues can be major causes of lost time and revenue, but there is a solution to this – automated print deployment, as Matthew Lee, product marketing manager at PaperCut, explains.
For many organisations, print issues are a major time sink. Studies suggest that between one in four and one in two IT help desk tickets are related to printing, from missing print queues to driver errors. This is a significant slice of IT capacity – in an area that doesn’t really add strategic value to the business.
Print is often described as the ‘silent drain’ on IT resources. To put things into perspective, let’s say a medium-sized IT helpdesk has two staff members who each take about 30 calls a day.
Say that one-third of these are related to printing: that’s roughly 20 calls. Some of these might be easy to solve over the phone, like paper jams or toner shortages. But for more complex problems, such as connectivity issues or hardware malfunctions, the IT team may need to make a physical inspection of the printer or spend time at someone’s desk.
But what is the cost of those print-related tickets? Take those 20 calls multiplied by an average cost of £17 per ticket multiplied by 250 working days across the year. That adds up to at least £85,000 – not to mention the time wasted on lost productivity. Interested in cutting that cost out? Read on.
Common print-related helpdesk problems
Let’s start by looking at where the bulk of print tickets come from. In my experience, print drivers are responsible for many common issues. When new devices are added or operating systems are updated, drivers often become mismatched or outdated, resulting in users losing colour options, print jobs failing and printers vanishing from the list of options.
Print queues are another frequent source of user frustration. The classic culprit is a print job getting stuck in a shared queue and blocking everyone else from printing. There are also a lot of basic setup challenges, such as calls to IT about how to add a printer. When users are non-technical or working remotely, even simple tasks can become complicated.
Connectivity and access issues can also require IT support. When printers are installed manually, IT teams have to connect each individual user to the print server. In a hybrid working environment, users could have trouble connecting remotely or might be trying to print to devices on a different site or network.
These recurring problems create a repetitive cycle for IT teams, where they are constantly putting out fires that should be preventable.
Automated print queue deployment
But there’s a simple fix for many of these common issues: automated print queue deployment. This takes the manual, error-prone setup process out of the equation. It allows IT teams to install and test print queues centrally, ensuring that all drivers, settings and access controls function correctly. These queues are then automatically pushed out to users, based on the network they’re connected to, their user group or department and their specific device or workstation.
In practice, this means that when someone moves between sites, the right printer appears automatically in their list. So, if they walk into a new office and connect to the Wi-Fi, they can hit ‘print’ without any manual installation or extra steps needed. No calls to the helpdesk about missing queues.
Then, because users only see the correct printer, it removes confusion about where to send (or find) their print job. Queues are automatically tied to locations and permissions, meaning fewer access issues. And each user has their own set of queues – rather than sharing a single server queue – so one person’s stuck print job won’t affect everyone else.
Reducing the print burden on IT teams and users
Modern print management solutions offer a range of benefits to IT admins and end users. They are designed to seamlessly support mobile and remote printing, which is critical in the hybrid work era.
IT teams have visibility and control over the entire print environment from a single console, making it easy to set and enforce print policies such as duplex, black-and-white printing as the default. When there are issues, centralised cloud-based management enables IT teams to resolve them quickly regardless of where they are working that day.
In the meantime, taking print tickets off the helpdesk can free up the IT team, allowing them to redirect their energy towards innovation and strategy. By adopting centralised cloud print management and automated print queue deployment, a print environment will (almost) run itself – potentially eliminating a third or more of helpdesk tickets related to printing.
