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Best Tips For Outsourcing Your Printing & Imaging Management
One strategy that is gaining in popularity for dealing with the ongoing recession is to outsource your printing and imaging management. Firms that have trimmed their headcount -- and therefore their internal resources -- are finding outsourcing to be a great way to maintain or improve service levels while allowing staffers to concentrate on their core competencies.
Another reason is to save money and time. It's quicker to outsource than to hire new staff because you don't have the time and expense of on-the-job training. Even firms with well-established work processes find process- and service-level enhancements with outsource organizations that specialize with law firms and introduce best practices.
A good analogy is the payroll function. Many firms decided long ago that they no longer wanted to maintain that function internally, and now almost all companies have successfully outsourced it.
The key to successful outsourcing is discovering a company that is competent in that function -- which is easier said than done according to a Gartner Group study a few years ago. Its most interesting conclusion is that only a few outsourced IT relationships work well, primarily because the vendor isn't always capable of doing the job properly. As a result, the firm's internal staff spends so much time micro-managing the tasks that, in hindsight, it might have been more efficient just to keep them all in-house.
Understand what outsourcing is and what it is not! It's not like calling in the Maytag repairman and then sitting there and watching him repair the refrigerator. When you outsource managed print services, you are passing that responsibility to an outside party so that you no longer have to manage the details. You'll need to manage the relationship, but not the tasks themselves.
I recommend four steps to properly choosing a vendor of managed print services:
- STEP #1. Get referrals. One great source are the Peer Groups of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) where you can ask other firms whether they have an outside vendor managing their laser printer fleet, who is that company, and how is that relationship working for them? There's no better way to find an outsource company than through personal recommendations.
- STEP #2. Interview the companies to assess them. Be wary of vendors who tell you that, yes, they can do exactly what you want even before they understand what you need done. You want a firm that is willing to invest the time to understand your company which, frankly, is quite a lengthy process. For instance, Advantage sends out field engineers to do an assessment, take an inventory, determine what it costs to operate your fleet -- and all of this is done prior to our first discussion with the client.
- STEP #3. Study the outsource company while it's studying you. Determine what caliber of people they send to your offices. Do they understand your processes? Are your staff and theirs compatible? Take your time; this due diligence period takes most law firms up to a year to complete. But that's OK. Printing is mission critical and shouldn't be turned over to just anyone. A good analogy is your dial tone. When you pick up the phone, you expect it to be there. Print capabilities, too, must always be there when you need them.
- STEP #4. When you've signed your vendor, don't just trust that they'll do a good job and walk away. We here at Advantage insist on giving clients a regular cadence of feedback. We visit them every three months to do an account review; we talk about what we did during the quarter, what we prevented, and what we recommend to improve efficiency going forward.
And so the message here is that due diligence is the uppermost priority when taking on an outsource company. You need to be convinced that they can solve yesterday's problems so they don't keep recurring, that there's a process in place for things to be taken care of today, and that the future is planned.
And you can print that!
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ADVANTAGE ENTERPRISES will be at LEGALTECH
NEW YORK 2009 when it takes place at the Hilton New York Hotel Feb. 2-4.
Click here or call
1-800-530-3190
to set up an appointment.
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About Your
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Advantage Enterprises
PO Box 7533
New York, NY 10150-7533
1.800.530.3190 |
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About Us |
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Advantage Enterprises delivers advisory and managed print services, primarily to Am Law 100 law firms so they can focus on their highest and best purpose of billing their time and growing their client base.
For over 20 years, Advantage's environmentally green
lifecycle management programs have increased productivity
of printing and imaging fleets and cut costs while
saving the environment.
To learn more about what gives the top law firms their
competitive edge, please visit our Web site at www.advtg.com
or e-mail us at
marketing@advtg.com. |
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Philip Finnerty is senior manager of user support at Washington, D.C.-based Crowell & Moring LLP. Recently he took a few minutes to chat about his decision just over a year ago to outsource his managed print services program.
"Why do we have printer episodes when printer drivers or firmware are updated? Episodes include printers not coming out of sleep mode, print jobs going to the wrong paper trays, and the workstation not recognizing a printer. Many times these problems occur after we upgrade firmware."
Some IT shops upgrade firmware globally which, in many cases, is the source of these printer errors. This should never be done as the firmware may produce different results when interacting with different software applications.
