The average enterprise spends between one and three percent of its revenues (Gartner) on printing...

That means the costs of wasting money in your print environment can be massive!

What's more, up to 90% of the total printing costs in a large organisation might be invisible or uncontrolled, says Holger Groenert, product marketing manager at Itec Distribution. With paper usage growing rather than declining, the problem is likely to get much worse over the next decade. Companies need to put business intelligence tools in place in their document output environments to take charge of the problem.

This is where business intelligence tools such as Itec Print Director have an invaluable role to play in providing organisations with the information they need to better control their costs and print usage. They can help enterprises understand volume, typical and peak usage patterns, and sources of print, and manage them better.

Businesses are neglecting to control access to sensitive material that may be scanned, printed or copied.

Companies need to build strong user authentication and user privilege management controls into their document output environments to ensure that confidential information is safe from eyes that should not see it.

A raft of options are available to organisations using up to date technology such as follow-me printing and access control. Follow-me printing forces users to authenticate themselves at the printer, preventing sensitive documents from lying in the output tray. Another office automation security innovation is access control via card or even biometric readers, allowing only the user with the relevant security credentials to access the device and some or all of it's functionality.

A new study from CompTIA finds that organisations are increasingly looking at managed print services in their strive to become paperless offices. The non-profit trade association for the IT industry surveyed 400 IT and business executives involved in print and document management decisions for the report.

According to CompTIA, four out of five of the firms surveyed list becoming a paperless office as a priority for them, although they also maintain that printing is embedded in their day-to-day operations. The findings were part of the study, titled "Examining the Print and Document Management Market."

South African companies are increasingly looking towards managed print services as a means of bringing runaway document output costs back under control.

Holger Groenert, product marketing manager at Itec Distribution, says that companies are under pressure to focus on their core competencies and reduce costs in a tough economic climate. Since print costs can run as high as 3% of total revenue in certain enterprises (Gartner research), saving money on printing can have a big impact on the bottom line.

Businesses adopting a managed print service can expect significant cost savings, more time to spend on core business activities and intelligent consolidation of existing print fleets, reducing overlap and needless waste.

If one of your multi-function devices goes down, your business suffers immediately. However, if you put Itec Sentry on watch, you can rest assured that our powerful technology allows us to manage your infrastructure from a distance as effectively as if a technician was to be on-site, monitoring your devices 24 hours a day.

Thanks to Sentry, Itec will know almost instantly when your print infrastructure needs intervention, without you needing to pick the phone up and order consumables or report a fault. In addition, when the technician arrives at your premises to help you with a fault, he will already have the spares and information he needs to quickly resolve your problem.

Businesses adopting a managed print service can expect significant cost savings, more time to spend on core business activities and intelligent consolidation of existing print fleets, reducing overlap and needless waste.

As the information age gets into full swing, businesses find themselves drowning in the exponential growth of emails, faxes, paper and electronic documents. Whether you are a large organisation or a small to medium business, managing an incessant stream of documents from varied sources can be a major cost.

Consider too, the new regulations governing the storage and auditabilty of information and the hours of productivity lost by employees as they spend valuable time searching for documents. Sounds like a headache doesn't it?

A document management strategy is a combination of software, systems and best practice that could revolutionise the way your business consumes, stores and organises documents in any format and from any source.

Imagine finding what you and your employees want, when you need it and in a format that you can use, 24/7/365!