Monitoring and Service Management Tools

 

What are the Benefits?

There is no doubt that the technology for monitoring and controlling the implementation of print and copy is developing at a pace that provides tremendous advantage for those organisations willing to embrace these capabilities.

The benefits of such control are visible in almost all parts of the organisation and can be implemented for printers, copiers and document transmission over fax.

Help Desk Service and Resources

IT helpdesks who try and support a mass of deployed printers across the organisation are fully aware of the commitment in resources and time that the reactive support process creates. In our experience we have often found that helpdesk staff can spend as much as 40% of their time supporting printer driver issues, lost prints and formatting problems.

Employing remote management tools within the proper environment can provide significant consistency in setting up, distribution of drivers and alerting and monitoring that will free up helpdesk resources to provide more proactive services achieving a higher level of customer satisfaction.

Software tools for rerouting and print control can protect the first line support of the help desk by carrying out automatic rerouting in case of loading or failure buying supporting a higher level of availability for the end users and increasing end user satisfaction.

Finance Costs and Accountability

Monitoring the loading of the devices and the users provides assurance of asset utilisation and confidence that the investment in IT is being effectively "sweated". The reports available from the tools can be used to justify expenditure or otherwise.

Significant reductions in wastage and mis-use are avoided through effective education of the users ensuring that the overall cost of the infrastructure is visible and controlled.

The ability to chargeback to both users and for some organisations to clients is simplified so that either cost accountability or cost recovery becomes a low overhead activity.

IT & Building Facilities Change Management

The control of assets within the environment becomes part of the common policy of the organisation rather than an exceptional and costly side activity. It is possible to know at all times which devices are in use and which devices are becoming surplus to requirements and should be removed.

Device removals can be planned and implemented with confidence using the supporting metrics from the tools. Removing devices has the effect of reducing costs in many areas including re-purchase, service, consumables and floor space resulting in many side benefits.

The inevitable change process caused by departmental moves and building changes can be incorporated into the standard building refurbishment programmes by utilising the departmental usage reports. This creates the opportunity for perfect redesign and relocation projects offering high levels of performance throughout the change and ongoing.

How we can help?

Whether you have partly implemented device tools such as Centreware Web or HP Web Jetadmin or are considering queue management and tracking, we can assess your needs and help you achieve your goals more quickly.