Printing continues to support essential business workflows across departments, locations, and teams. As organizations grow and work patterns change, print environments often expand to accommodate new requirements. Without a clear strategy in place, this can introduce unnecessary complexity and inefficiencies over time.
A smart printer strategy takes a more intentional approach. It aligns devices, workflows, and policies with business objectives — helping organizations strengthen security, control costs, and support productivity without adding operational burden.
In this guide, we’ll outline the key steps to building a smart print strategy — from assessing current needs to selecting the right solutions and optimizing costs and performance over time.
Understanding your business needs
A smart print strategy starts with visibility. Before evaluating new devices or services, it’s important to understand how printing is actually used across your organization today. This helps reveal inefficiencies, clarify priorities, and ensure future decisions are grounded in real business needs — not assumptions.
Assess current printing volume and patterns
Begin by looking at how much printing is happening and where. This doesn’t need to be overly complex, but it should provide a realistic baseline.
Key areas to review include:
- Monthly print volumes by device and location
- Color versus black-and-white usage
- Peak printing times and high-demand departments
- Devices that are frequently idle, overused, or prone to downtime
Gaining this level of visibility is often the first step towards more effective print management strategies, helping organizations see where print volume, device usage, and demand are concentrated.
This type of assessment also brings greater clarity around the total cost of printing, which is often higher than expected once supplies, maintenance, and support are considered together.
Identify departmental requirements
Not all teams use printers in the same way. Understanding these differences helps avoid a one-size-fits-all approach that can create friction or overspending. For example:
- Finance and HR may prioritize secure print release and audit trails
- Marketing and sales teams often require higher-quality color output
- Operations or frontline staff may need fast, reliable access with simple, repeatable print workflows
- Hybrid or mobile employees may benefit from the ability to securely print across locations and devices
Capturing these differences early helps clarify which printing policies and controls should be applied consistently across the organization, and where teams may need different device capabilities to support their work. This creates a clearer foundation for aligning devices, security controls, and access policies with day-to-day needs.
Evaluate document management workflows
A smart print strategy depends on understanding more than just printers and volumes. It also requires visibility into how documents move through the business, since printing is often one step within a larger document journey that includes scanning, routing, storage, approvals, and sharing across systems.
When reviewing document workflows, it helps to look at:
- How documents enter the organization (paper, email, digital forms)
- Where manual steps slow things down or introduce errors
- Opportunities to replace paper-based handoffs with digital workflows
- Whether scanned information is searchable, indexed, and easy to retrieve
Viewing workflows through this lens helps clarify how and why printing is used, not just where devices sit. When print is considered in isolation, small inefficiencies are easy to miss.
Reviewing document workflows end to end often reveals manual steps, duplicate effort, or gaps in visibility — insights that create a stronger foundation for informed print decisions as the print environment evolves.
Selecting the right printer solutions
Once you have a clear view of how printing is used across the business, the next step is choosing print solutions that support everyday work while still aligning with longer-term business goals.
The right mix of devices can reduce friction for employees, simplify oversight for IT, and adapt as work patterns change — while the wrong choices can quietly introduce unnecessary costs or complexity.
Key features to look for in modern business printers
- Security and access controls, such as user authentication and secure print release
- Centralized visibility into usage, device health, and demand trends
- Support for digital document workflows, particularly around scanning and routing
- Remote monitoring and updates, that reduce hands-on maintenance
- Simple, intuitive interfaces that minimize training and support requests
Multifunction printers vs. print-only devices
Choosing between multifunction printers (MFPs) and a single function printer isn’t about which option is better overall — it’s about using the right tool in the right place.
- Multifunction printers often serve as shared document hubs, supporting printing, scanning, copying, and sometimes faxing into one device, while also supporting digital workflows such as scan-to-email, scan-to-folder, and cloud-based document routing. They work well in shared spaces where teams handle a variety of document tasks throughout the day.
- Print-only devices are typically better suited for environments where speed, volume, or consistency is the priority, such as departments that primarily produce large quantities of color and/or black-and-white documents that require high speed output.
At times, many organizations benefit from a blended approach. This kind of intentional device placement is often part of a successful printer upgrade strategy, helping balance flexibility, performance, and long-term cost control.
Why wireless, mobile, and cloud printing matter
Flexible work models have changed expectations around printing. Employees increasingly move between desks, locations, and remote environments, making it less practical to rely on printing that only works from a single location or workstation.
Wireless, mobile, and cloud printing make it easier for organizations to:
- Let employees print securely from different locations without extra steps, reconfiguration, or IT support
- Reduce reliance on fixed desktops and networks, while still applying the same access controls and policies
- Allow print jobs to be submitted remotely and released securely on-site, reducing abandoned or exposed documents
- Keep usage, security, and policies visible and enforceable, even as printing becomes more flexible
For many organizations, this flexibility is enabled through cloud print services, which allow print jobs to be submitted and managed without relying solely on local infrastructure.
When evaluating print solutions, it’s important to consider how well they support flexible access without compromising security, policy enforcement, or visibility across the print environment.
Implementing managed print services
For many organizations, defining a smart print strategy is only part of the challenge. The real work begins when that strategy needs to be applied consistently across devices, locations, and users. This is where managed print services can play an important role.
Rather than managing printers, supplies, and support internally, managed print services shift much of that responsibility to a dedicated provider — helping organizations reduce day-to-day complexity, while keeping printing reliable and costs predictable.
Outsourcing print management can deliver value beyond basic device maintenance. When implemented well, managed services help organizations:
- Reduce the operational burden on IT teams, by handling monitoring, updates, and support across the print environment
- Improve reliability and user experience, with proactive maintenance that helps prevent downtime before it impacts employees
- Create more consistency across locations, even as printer fleets grow or change over time
Streamlining print operations through centralized oversight
Managed print services often rely on centralized print management to bring greater visibility and control to distributed print environments. With centralized oversight and analytics, organizations can better understand how devices are used, where demand is concentrated, and how policies are being applied.
This level of coordination makes it easier to standardize configurations, enforce security controls, and adjust the print environment as business needs evolve.
Unlocking cost savings over time
One of the most practical advantages of managed print services is their ability to bring structure and predictability to print spending. In many environments, costs accumulate quietly — spread across supplies, maintenance, energy use, and internal support time — making them difficult to track or manage in isolation.
Managed print solutions help organizations address this by:
- Limiting unnecessary output through smarter defaults and print rules, helping reduce excess pages
- Aligning device capacity with real usage, so organizations aren’t paying to support underused or poorly placed equipment
- Replacing reactive repairs with planned service models, reducing surprise costs and improving budget forecasting
Over time, this more disciplined approach helps organizations control print-related expenses while supporting consistent service levels and long-term planning.
Optimizing printing costs and efficiency
Once the right devices, access models, and services are in place, the next opportunity lies in fine-tuning how printing is used daily. Small adjustments in habits, defaults, and review practices can have an outsized impact on both cost and efficiency over time.
Reducing unnecessary printing at the source
Many print-related costs don’t come from business-critical documents, but from routine or avoidable printing. Addressing this starts with guiding behavior rather than adding restrictions.
Effective approaches include:
- Setting smarter defaults, such as double-sided or black-and-white printing for everyday documents
- Encouraging digital alternatives for drafts, internal reviews, and short-term reference materials
- Prompting users to confirm larger print jobs, helping reduce accidental or unneeded output
These changes are often simple to implement, but over time they can significantly reduce page volume without disrupting productivity.
Making sustainability part of everyday printing
Optimizing print efficiency also creates an opportunity to support environmental goals. More sustainable printing practices often align naturally with cost reduction and operational efficiency.
Organizations can make progress by:
- Using energy-efficient devices and sleep settings to reduce power consumption during idle periods
- Consolidating print jobs and retiring inefficient devices, lowering energy use and supply waste
- Choosing responsible supply and recycling programs, including paper and consumables
By embedding sustainability into everyday printing decisions, organizations can reduce their footprint while reinforcing broader corporate responsibility efforts.
Using print usage trends to drive ongoing improvement
Optimization isn’t a one-time effort. Regularly reviewing how printing is used helps organizations spot emerging inefficiencies and adjust before they become costly.
Instead of focusing on individual print jobs, it’s often more effective to look for patterns over time, such as:
- Shifts in volume by department or location
- Changes in color versus black-and-white usage
- New behaviors tied to hybrid or remote work
Tracking these trends supports continuous improvement, helping organizations adapt print policies and practices as needs change — without having to rethink their entire print strategy.
Ready to put a smart print strategy in action? Explore print solutions designed to support your business needs.