What Can an Enterprise MPS Assessment Reveal?

MPS assessments determine the current condition of your enterprise document environment, but they can do more than that. Information captured in an assessment lays the foundation for improving and optimizing your current environment plus your document workflow.

Assessment tools can now take data capture beyond device-centric information to reveal document analytics detail. This provides useful information such as what applications are used in printing, like MS Word or Outlook. For example, if 30 percent of what an employee prints are emails, that signifies an opportunity to improve by limiting printing from Outlook. MPS capabilities have become quite sophisticated in how the enterprise print environment can be configured and optimized, and data from assessments drives this.

Who, What, Why and More
Insights from assessments and analytics go a long way toward helping enterprises identify and implement printing and document best practices. That’s especially important for a large, far flung enterprise, which faces bigger hurdles in evaluating and optimizing a global document environment.

Here are some of the areas where an MPS assessment can lead the way to better practices:

• Device Profiles — An assessment discovers how many devices are in your environment, where they are, what work they’re doing and what capabilities are empowered on each device.
• Capabilities Gaps — Just as important, an assessment identifies capabilities that are missing or weak, such as mobile printing or information security – areas you can address through an MPS strategy. Knowing what isn’t there is critical for planning a future state.
• Document Storage Conditions — A large enterprise assessment can address the vast banks of filing cabinets and other repositories for paper-based documents. This storage often remains unlocked and unsecured. Assessments can lead to better ways to access, share and secure document information.
• Mindful Printing Habits – Imagine understanding who is printing what in order to help establish better printing guidelines. Imagine knowing how many spreadsheet pages the Director of Operations creates. Or does the VP of Sales print a lot of emails? Maybe the VP of Marketing print three or four presentation drafts in color before the final version. It’s not about restricting output, but ensuring it’s being produced in the most efficient, sustainable way based on company goals. Advanced assessments help enterprise users more aware of their habits, so they can be mindful of printing behaviors.
• Sustainability Compliance — If you’ve adopted sustainability initiatives or plan to, your organization wants to make sure employees aren’t wasting paper. An assessment identifies the opportunities to improve and document results. The smarter people get about sustainable print, the better it is for all.
• Printing Anomalies and Refinements – Assessments use analytics see how paper moves around your enterprise. You can compare output patterns and volumes and identify differences across departments. For example, analytics might discover that this month the HR division printed more pages than anyone else. In context, this makes sense, because HR has performance appraisals, compliance documents and many other types of output. Or Marketing has printed more color than anyone else, but that’s because it’s in product launch phase. Analytics flags anomalies, but also capture the context to make informed decisions and establish guidelines.

You can’t even plan for the future, much less execute a strategy without the information from an assessment. The enterprise MPS assessment  provides the basis to refine policies, save money and be more productive and effective. It tells where you are with your printing goals and how to reach them faster. When you meet with MPS providers, ask about how their assessments lead to better document environments.

Learn more reasons for getting an MPS assessment, 26 as a matter of fact. Just click through to this SlideShare content.