Managed Print Services: A Guide to Cutting Print Costs

What are Managed Print Services?

Managed Print Services (MPS) means outsourcing the management of an organization's printing environment, rather than handling the printers, supplies, maintenance and monitoring separately. That typically covers the printer fleet itself, consumables like paper and ink, equipment maintenance, and ongoing monitoring of print volume and costs, as well as broader document management and print strategy.

A provider usually starts with a print audit of the existing fleet before proposing what to keep, replace or consolidate, so the organization is not committing to new contracts or hardware before it knows what it already has and what that is costing it. That audit is also what turns the rest of this guide from general advice into a specific plan for one organization's fleet.

Why do print costs often go unnoticed?

Print costs are easy to underestimate because they are spread across several categories: equipment maintenance versus replacement, consumables, and energy use from running printers. None of these show up as one line item, so a business can be paying far more for printing than it realizes without ever seeing a single number that looks wrong.

A reactive approach, where problems are only addressed once they cause visible disruption, tends to let these costs build up unnoticed, because nobody is checking the fleet until something breaks. A proactive approach, with regular monitoring and oversight instead of a single annual check, is what MPS providers aim to deliver.

How do you move from reactive to proactive print management?

Moving from reactive to proactive print management is less about buying new equipment than about putting a cycle of measurement and policy in place around the fleet an organization already runs. The steps below are the usual order: audit first, because policies set before anyone knows the real usage tend to miss the biggest sources of waste, then set objectives, write policies, monitor continuously and keep staff trained as the tools or rules change.

• Conduct a print audit: collect data on the current printer fleet, monthly print volume and costs.
• Set clear objectives, such as lower costs or better document management.
• Set print policies, for example default double-sided printing or limits on color printing, and communicate them to staff.
• Monitor print volume and supply use on an ongoing basis through managed care or an equivalent service, and review the data regularly rather than only when a problem appears.
• Train employees on the new tools and policies so the change sticks.

What should you compare when choosing an MPS provider?

An MPS contract usually runs for more than a year, so the comparison matters more than the sign-up price: a provider that is cheaper at the start but cannot scale pricing, support or integration with what the organization already runs tends to cost more by the time the contract is renegotiated. The table below summarizes the three areas worth comparing before signing.

Beyond cost savings, proactive print management can also reduce unplanned downtime, through maintenance and supply monitoring, and improve document management and security practices across the business. None of that requires a large organization: the same audit-first discipline applies whether the fleet is five printers or five hundred.

It also applies more broadly to running a print business: the same discipline of auditing before committing applies to other ways to run a print business more efficiently and to deciding which products to offer online in the first place. Printing itself has gone through several such shifts already, from woodblock and movable type to the on-demand digital printing a modern print fleet runs on.