Self Healing with Alerts and Monitoring for Business Continuity


The Business Issue

Businesses and Users are becoming increasingly reliant on Printers and MFDs which are now a key part of the business process. These devices are often rationalised to a point where they are shared between many users and so the failure of one device could seriously impact a whole department stopping the business from trading sufficiently well until normal service can be resumed.

For transactional print where there is a need to produce shipping notes, dockets which are mission critical to the business for shipping and logistics then this need can be mission critical.

Historically the concept of business continuity has not been applied to printing and copying although it is a familiar IT term used in server and network management and now the implementation of desktop and mobile clients. The traditional approach of dealing with this issue is to duplicate or triplicate devices in case of failure and to pay for the highest level of service to get an engineer on site as quickly as possible.

The problems with this approach are obvious:

	4 hour response and even on site engineers are incredibly expensive.
	Business has to wait until the "Engineer called" sign has been removed.
	Extra devices require switching over time and otherwise remain dormant or in low use.
	The support teams are still reactive and need to be available to service the need.
	Out of hours is frequently when issues arise and resolution has to wait till next day.

Our Solution

1. Alerting and Monitoring

We have built a number of self healing environments that allow the printers and MFDs to be monitored throughout their life. Of course this is available 24x7. The devices can have alerts set up to warn of toner status and paper jams. When an trigger occurs, the helpdesk can be paged or emailed and they can resolve the issue without waiting for the users to call. In some cases it is possible to implement a solution remotely and get the device working again. In other cases, a desk side visit can be quickly scheduled to resolve the issue. These alerts can also be routed via your help desk system to provide a fully integrated job ticket.

2. Failover

We can also put in place low cost software solutions that provide the capability to watch for errors and before the help desk has been alerted our software can reroute print to a working device that is close to the user and notify both the user and the helpdesk of the transfer. This ensures that the users continue to get a business service until the original device is recovered. This provides for high availability management without the need to purchase high availability repair services. The device that receives the print is also working regularly and not sat idle in case of failure and so this can improve your ability to use your assets wisely.

3. Load Balancing

Our software also has the capability of recognising when devices are becoming overloaded and can divert print to local devices again notifying the users. This can allow for optimal usage of devices while keeping down the overall costs of the environment and keeping the users very happy indeed.

4. Trend Monitoring

Knowledge can give you the confidence to know that your environment can operate to high levels of service. You can use the ability to report on outages, usage profiles, volume trends and user behaviour. We can show you how to create the best management reporting available using industry standard tools that can be accessed by both your IT organisations and your business users.