Print Fleet Management and Managed Print Services (MPS)

Managed Print Services (MPS) is an outsourced arrangement where a third-party provider takes responsibility for managing and optimising your entire print environment. This typically includes monitoring device health and toner levels, automatically dispatching replacement consumables, performing proactive maintenance, and providing detailed reporting on print volumes and costs. The goal of MPS is to reduce waste, lower costs, improve uptime, and free IT staff from printer-related support tasks.

MPS providers range from the printer manufacturers themselves (HP, Xerox, Ricoh, Konica Minolta) to independent managed service providers and IT resellers. Contracts are typically structured as a cost-per-page model, where you pay a fixed rate per printed page that covers hardware, consumables, and service. This replaces the unpredictable cycle of buying toner cartridges, calling out technicians, and replacing devices ad-hoc.

Most organisations drastically underestimate their total print spend. The visible costs—purchasing a printer and buying toner—represent only a fraction of the true expense. Hidden costs include:

• Consumables – Toner, ink, drums, fusers, maintenance kits, and paper. High-yield toner cartridges for laser printers can cost $200–$500 each.
• Energy – Laser printers and MFPs draw significant power, especially during warm-up. A large MFP can consume over 1,500 watts during peak operation.
• IT support time – Driver issues, paper jams, print queue errors, and network connectivity problems are among the most common helpdesk tickets in any organisation.
• Wasted output – Studies consistently show that up to 30 per cent of print jobs are never collected from the printer tray. This represents wasted toner, paper, and money.
• Device proliferation – Without governance, departments accumulate desktop inkjet printers that are expensive to run and difficult to manage centrally.

The first step toward optimising your print environment is understanding what you currently have. A print fleet assessment involves:

• Device inventory – Cataloguing every printer, MFP, copier, and fax machine across all locations, including personal desktop printers that staff may have purchased themselves.
• Volume analysis – Recording pages printed per month on each device. Most networked printers expose page counters via SNMP, and fleet management software can poll these automatically.
• Cost-per-page calculation – Dividing the total cost of ownership (hardware, consumables, energy, maintenance) by total pages to arrive at an actual cost per page for each device. You may find that a small desktop inkjet costs $0.15 per page while a departmental laser MFP costs $0.02.
• Utilisation mapping – Identifying under-utilised devices (printing fewer than 500 pages per month) and over-utilised devices (exceeding their rated duty cycle).

Once you have visibility into your print environment, an MPS engagement delivers tangible benefits:

• Predictable costs – A fixed cost-per-page model replaces unpredictable capital and consumable expenses with a single, forecastable monthly invoice.
• Automatic toner replenishment – The MPS provider monitors toner levels remotely and dispatches replacement cartridges before devices run out, eliminating emergency orders and downtime.
• Proactive maintenance – Rather than waiting for a device to break down, the provider schedules preventive maintenance based on page counts and usage patterns.
• Reduced IT burden – Printer support tickets are redirected to the MPS provider, freeing internal IT staff to focus on higher-value work.
• Fleet optimisation – The provider recommends consolidation opportunities, such as replacing ten desktop printers with two strategically placed departmental MFPs.

Printers are network-connected devices that process sensitive information, yet they are frequently overlooked in security audits. Key print security measures include:

• Secure print release (pull printing) – Print jobs are held in a queue and only released when the user authenticates at the device with a PIN, badge tap, or mobile app. This prevents sensitive documents from sitting uncollected on the output tray.
• Audit trails – Logging who printed what, when, and on which device. This is essential for compliance in legal, healthcare, and financial services environments.
• Encrypted data in transit – Enabling TLS/SSL for print jobs sent over the network prevents interception.
• Hard drive encryption and overwrite – MFPs with internal hard drives should encrypt stored data and overwrite it after each job to prevent data recovery if the device is decommissioned or stolen.
• Firmware updates – Keeping printer firmware up to date patches known vulnerabilities, just as you would patch servers and workstations.

Simple policy changes can dramatically reduce print waste and consumable costs:

• Follow-me printing – Users send a job to a universal queue and release it at whichever printer is most convenient. Jobs that are never released are automatically deleted after a set period (e.g., 8 hours), eliminating the estimated 30 per cent of uncollected print jobs.
• Default duplex (double-sided) printing – Setting duplex as the default across all devices can cut paper consumption by up to 50 per cent with minimal user impact.
• Default mono (black and white) – Colour printing costs five to ten times more per page than mono. Defaulting to mono and requiring users to actively select colour discourages unnecessary colour printing.
• Print quotas – Assigning monthly page allowances to departments or individual users encourages conscious printing behaviour.

Fleet consolidation is one of the quickest wins in print management. The typical pattern in unmanaged environments is a mix of personal desktop printers (cheap to buy, expensive to run) and a few shared MFPs. Right-sizing involves:

• Removing personal desktop printers and replacing them with strategically placed departmental MFPs.
• Aiming for a ratio of roughly one device per 10–15 users in an office environment, adjusted based on print volume.
• Choosing MFPs with the right duty cycle for their expected volume—an MFP rated for 5,000 pages per month should not be asked to handle 20,000.
• Standardising on one or two printer models to simplify consumable stocking and driver management.

Print optimisation has a direct environmental benefit. Reducing paper consumption saves trees and water, lowering energy usage reduces carbon emissions, and extending device lifespan keeps electronic waste out of landfill. Many MPS providers offer toner cartridge recycling programmes and can report on your organisation's environmental savings as part of their service. For businesses with sustainability reporting obligations, these metrics can contribute to ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) targets.