25
Jan, 2021
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Is Going Paperless Cost Effective?

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Printing is costly and those costs come from a lot of different directions. They come from paper and ink and the fact that printers seem to need constant maintenance. For some businesses, it’s all too much and they are actively looking for ways to go paperless and cut out their printing and filing costs. Today, we will examine whether or not forsaking the troublesome printer is actually cost effective. 

A Couple Reasons to Go Paperless

Obviously, if your business is looking to cut out its printing costs, you’ve identified printing as being prohibitive to your business’ operational budget in some way. It’s true that your average employee doesn’t consider your business’ paper, ink, and printing costs when they print off every document they work on; or worse yet, three-dozen NCAA brackets. They just figure that you’ve got it worked out. So one reason is to obviously cut costs. 

Another reason is that it’s basically unnecessary. Today, most employees, customers, vendors, etc. have access to machines that can function better (and faster) than traditional business document filing strategies. Smartphones, laptops, and other mobile devices all can access databases filled with content much faster and more efficiently than the fastest file clerk can deliver it. While this also cuts costs, relying on always-available digital systems just makes sense in today’s business climate. 

What is a DMS?

A DMS, or Document Management System, is effectively a digital database of all the paper files your employees would ever need, and it is how businesses cut costs from traditional methods of paper-filing and retrieval. With a DMS, your paper documents are scanned and digitized. They are then filed away in a computer database that can be accessed around the clock so that the people that need access to that information, have it on demand.

Many people may not understand just how expensive filing can be for a business. Not only do you have to pay an entire staff of people to constantly file and retrieve paper files, you also need to have a filing system in place that is secure and makes files readily available. Industry averages are about 7-to-12 cents per page to scan and upload to a DMS. This is substantially lower than the printing, payroll, and storage costs of keeping an onsite paper-filing system. 

So while there are still costs involved, they don’t recur at the same rate once the file is scanned and stored inside the DMS. Anyone with access to the database will be able to access the file. Best yet, securing the file is as simple as managing user account access; something that most businesses already do with their digital resources. 

So, How Does DMS Save My Business Money?

It’s simple. Once your files are stored in the DMS, you never have to worry about paying people to physically find a file. All they need to do is search the DMS and the document in question is available almost immediately. Not only that, file redundancy is there. The system comes with a comprehensive backup. Studies have shown that large organizations basically lose a file every six seconds, a problem you will avoid with a properly-functioning DMS. 

To talk to one of our experts about the possibility of managing your printing costs, and how a document management system helps in keeping those costs down, give our IT professionals a call today at 810.230.9455. 

27
Dec, 2019
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Print More Intelligently with Print Management

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Once upon a time, the printer was absolutely crucial for business to be conducted properly, but nowadays, the use of digital solutions has greatly reduced the need of printing things in greater volumes. However, this is not to say that printing is not still an important facet of your business to manage. Here, we’ll examine how print management can help a business do so.

Business Printing

In the past, businesses greatly relied on the use of their printers, but it really can’t be said that this use is particularly monitored, even now. As a matter of fact, a survey conducted by Buyer’s Laboratory suggests that a full 90 percent of companies (yes, nine-zero) don’t keep track of their printing costs – a number that can regularly add up to over five percent of a business’ total revenue. If this seems high, take a moment to consider the different expenses that contribute to this total.

Naturally, you have to consider the resources you need in order to use a printer. You need the requisite paper and ink, but not many people would think to include the electrical costs of keeping the printer in operation. You also need to take the time (about 15 percent of it) that your IT department spends dealing with printer-related issues and the 23 percent of help desk calls that are made in regard to these issues.

This all impacts your operational budget, and there’s a chance that you weren’t even aware of it.

What Can Be Done?

For starters, you need to begin tracking your printing costs, as it will be beneficial to find out how much of your budget is potentially being eaten away by unneeded spending there. Secondly, you should implement a print management solution to make it easier to continue this tracking in the future.

In order to really get the most out of your print management solution, you should have a strategy that allows you to do so. By granting you with greater insights into your printing, you can figure out ways to minimize or eliminate excessive costs, without negatively impacting the accessibility of printed materials.

When considering your options for a print management platform, we recommend that you look for the following features:

  • Comprehensive Assessments – As we said, many organizations don’t use any tools to keep track of their printing costs. This tool in particular will give you a better idea of how much is being printed, where it is being printed from, and when your devices are due for maintenance.
  • Print Management – A print management platform can provide you with precise controls over how your printers can be used.
  • Paper-to-Digital Conversions – By transferring your printed resources into digital ones, you can evaluate the value that they provide when printed and better optimize your printing costs.
  • Better Security – It stands to reason that your data security can improve when you have more control over this data. Hard copies inherently mean that you have less control, and a greater risk of a security issue.
  • Tracking Capabilities – By tracking how much is being printed, you can help optimize your costs through implementing certain controls, like user limitations on how much can be printed in a set amount of time.
  • Setting Print Policies – You can set up resource-saving policies like enforcing double-sided printing and establishing print quotas to prevent users from abusing the office printer.

If your business’ documents are resulting in excessive costs, reach out to our IT experts today! NuTech Services can help you keep your printing under control. Call 810.230.9455 to learn more.

11
Mar, 2019
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Here Is Some IT That Works for Professional Services

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All businesses need consultation from time to time. After all, nobody can be an expert in everything. These professional services, including those provided by lawyers, financial consultants, accountants, advertisers, and marketing specialists are all important to the success of any organization, but just like any other business, these companies have IT needs.

Today, we’ll be discussing some of the best IT solutions for professional services.

Software as a Service
The cloud has brought about a revolution in the way professional service firms think about and manage their software applications. Software as a Service, or SaaS for short, is the delivery of software through the cloud for a monthly fee. SaaS is usually billed per user, and it includes solutions such as Office 365 and G Suite. Software developers have created solutions that can be deployed through the cloud, providing many industries with cloud-based software that is built specifically for their needs.

Mobile Solutions
Mobility can open up a lot of doors for any business. For a professional services firm, there is more to consider, though. Many of these professional service providers need to consider federal, state, and industry requirements that demand additional layers of security for sending and receiving data. Therefore, the benefit of adding mobility to an infrastructure needs to be approached with considerable caution, as data security must be prioritized.

One of the best solutions to this dilemma is a virtual private network, or VPN. A VPN provides a layer of encryption around your communications between mobile devices and the central network infrastructure for your organization. This added security protects data while it’s in transit. It’s also a great solution for a business that wants to limit its use of paper records in favor of a more digital solution.

Document Management
Having access to information gives professionals the ability to stay connected to clients and other resources as needed, whether they are in the office or not. A document management system is the ideal way to digitally store and access files in a database; and trust us when we say it is much easier to find a document in a database compared to digging it out of a filing cabinet.

Professional technicians can scan an organization’s paper files through the use of a special software to deposit them inside a database in the form of PDF files. This database and a Relational database management system give an end user the ability to search the DMS for keywords found in the documents. All of this is accessible to users through an Internet connection, making it both accessible and convenient.

Through combining DMS with a VPN and SaaS offerings, professional services companies can achieve unprecedented security and data access. To learn more about how your organization can take advantage of these tools, reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

27
Jun, 2018
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Know Your Tech: CMS

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Marketing is increasingly critical to a business’ success, especially when it comes to the use of content as an impressions generator. This makes it all the more important for your content to be well organized and managed. Here, we’ll go over a few options you have as far as content management systems are concerned, and how they make maintaining your content strategy that much simpler.

What is a Content Management System?
A content management system, or CMS, is an application or program intended to assist you in properly producing, editing, and storing content. A CMS serves as a centralized access point for those with authorization to manage your content strategy, helping you to leverage it more effectively. Each CMS falls into one of two types:

  • Web content management
  • Enterprise content management

Depending on your business’ needs and circumstances, one of these choices will be the superior option for you to leverage.

Web-Based Content Management System (WCMS)
Drupal, Joomla, WordPress
If you’re in business today, chances are pretty good that you have a website, and that you hired a website creator to build it. The WCMS is how all of your content on the website is put together and organized, and because your website is the cornerstone of your online marketing, you need to be sure that this content is equipped with the management features and abilities that will boost its success. The other benefit to leveraging a WCMS is that they are largely user-friendly, which means that learning to manage a website is made into a much simpler process.

Because marketing needs can shift in days, or even hours, organizations like yours may need to make rapid changes to their site. A WCMS allows those changes to be made quickly and easily, keeping your content up-to-date and relevant, while incorporating engagement tools like social media, forms, and discussion boards.

Enterprise Content Management System
HP Distributed Workflow, IBM ECM, Oracle WebCenter Content
While there are a few small differences, the basic function of an enterprise content management system is effectively the same as a web-based one. Not only does it provide an organizational information repository for all of the members of the organization to access, it also provides the same content management capabilities. They are often leveraged by businesses in order to:

  • Manage access to organizational content, improving security
  • Improve collaboration through improved file access and searchability
  • Centralize an organization’s content
  • Build a digital content storage platform through the incorporation of a document management system
  • Improve workflow efficiency by creating and storing templates

Enterprise content management provides both access and control over a business’ information, a must in the competitive market of today, helping to boost their success and profitability.

If you have any questions about the different content management systems and software solutions that may benefit your business, you can always lean on the experts at NuTech Services. Call us at 810.230.9455 for more information.

8
Jun, 2018
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You Deserve a Better Way to Manage Your Business Documents

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A file cabinet might seem like it’s necessary for operations, but it’s actually not as useful as it used to be in the past. This is primarily due to the implementation of new solutions such as the document management system. By taking advantage of a new digital storage system for your business’ documents, you can optimize operations and ditch that filing cabinet for good.

What is a Document Management System?
In short, a document management system is a software that allows you to scan all of your paper files that have accumulated over the years and store them in a secure digital database. Better yet, this database is accessible from anywhere, as long as the user has permissions to access it. You can think of it as one big electronic filing cabinet. Since it’s hosted in the cloud or on your in-house infrastructure, you can integrate a document management system in whatever way best suits your organization’s needs.

Why You Might Want One
Imagine an office without filing cabinets, paper files, or printing costs. Any room that is being used to hold these bulky objects and any loose paper files can be freed up for other uses. Imagine never having to dig through countless files just to find one particular document again. Any documents you might need can be found just by going to your document management system via your smartphone or desktop. This makes for much more efficient use of your available resources as a whole.

Going Paperless
It’s easier to search for a digital file than it is to dig through a physical file folder. If you go paperless, this is one of the many benefits that you receive from a digital file storage system. Since you’re going paperless, you’ll be spending less on ink, paper, and printer maintenance–all of which totals up to a considerable cost. Since you can save time on accessing, editing, and saving documents, you’ll see improvements in productivity.

Let’s imagine that your organization is hit by a crippling disaster. It wipes out all of your filing cabinets and internal infrastructure. If you keep your document management system in the cloud, all of these files will be saved from the destruction. This keeps your data backed up in a secure location where it can be restored at a later date.

Perhaps one of the most notable ways your organization benefits from paperless technology is that you reduce your carbon footprint. If you waste a lot of paper, you contribute to a lot of environmental problems such as air pollution, water pollution, and deforestation. The United States alone wastes four million tons of office paper every year, so you can do your part to keep the environment clean by going paperless.

Does your business need help implementing such a solution? NuTech Services can help. To learn more, reach out to us at 810.230.9455.