Apr 7, 2021
Thermal printers are digital printers that use heat to print out on-demand labels for products and shipping, print receipts, barcodes, and managing specimen collection in hospitals. Hence, these devices are critical for certain business workflows and many organizations need their thermal printers in order and available to use 24/7.
If you look around your business, you will see thermal printers everywhere. The problem is that there is no one responsible for maintaining, supporting, and supplying these crucial devices.
Unlike regular printers, thermal printers are not just set-and-forget devices. They need to be maintained and optimized around the clock because of the nature of the work they do.
For an organization, a single out-of-order thermal printer can mean unshipped orders, unidentified patients, and cessation of all operations. Maintaining the quality of a thermal printer can be time-consuming, costly, and taxing for an organization. However, it can be even more of a problem if your thermal printer breaks down.
A typical organization’s IT team does not have the resources and manpower to optimize the performance of thermal printers to track printer supplies every day. Most of the time, it is the job of the front-line workers to troubleshoot any errors on the device, but they may not have the tools or the skills necessary to do so. In fact, thermal printer maintenance may only be taken once a machine shows an error or its supplies run out of stock.
This means your business may not be able to get the right labels, receipts, or slips, grinding operations to a halt and losing thousands of dollars per day.
That is why businesses need thermal managed printer services (T-MPS).
Thermal Managed Print Services allow you to transition to a more consumer-focused business model, which adds more value to your organization. These services facilitate the monitoring, maintenance, optimizing, and management of your company's thermal printers and include vendor-agnostic assessments as well as the replacement of your hardware, components, and supplies.
A thermal managed printer service provider will offer remote, but real-time visibility into all the printers in your facilities and will be able to get alerts on printer usage and supplies inventory. Armed with these metrics, the T-MPS will be able to respond immediately or proactively at the first sign of an issue that can lead to downtime.
Here are some of the benefits that thermal managed print services can offer you.
Your IT team has a lot of tasks to perform each day, so chances are they haven’t taken a look at your thermal printers’ performer in some time. With the help of thermal managed printer service, however, you can be sure that the performance of your thermal printers is being monitored and optimized all day, every day.
With T-MPS, your printer configuration becomes consistent, your supplies are in stock, and you can maximize the productivity of your printer fleet. This can help predict and prevent printer issues, reduce the workload significantly, and ensure the smooth running of business operations.
Your thermal printers are unlike regular printers; they do not just print paper, but they also hold sensitive information, including credit card information, patient IDs, guest ID badges, inventory, etc., which, if left vulnerable, can become a target for cybersecurity criminals.
A T-MPS can secure your network of thermal printers and ensure they do not become the weak link to your organization’s digital assets and infrastructure. By integrating multiple layers of protection, T-MPS can preemptively guard your thermal printers against external threats. It can also make security upgrades and maintenance stress-free so that you can have peace of mind.
Thermal managed printer service will have remote, real-time visibility into your thermal printer fleet and its network so that businesses can focus on their core competencies and less on the maintenance of their printers and their supplies.
A T-MPS will be able to access tools to monitor supplies consumption, receive alerts about printer usage, change the settings and configurations of a printer, conduct a diagnostic process, and submit orders for supplies.
Because of increased control and monitoring of your thermal printer fleet, it will be difficult for any issue to slip through the cracks and erupt into a bigger problem in the future.
Since T-MPS provides increased visibility into a thermal printer fleet, you will be armed with the knowledge of how and when to optimize the efficiency of your printers to meet business demands. With managed printer services, businesses can help maintain the right number and mix of printing supplies at every site with minimal human intervention.
With T-MPS, businesses can stabilize their thermal printing supply levels, which will ensure operations will not cease unexpectedly due to the unavailability of labels, wristbands, and ribbons, all of which can take days to fulfill and result in the mislabeling of IDs, specimens, and products.
T-MPS also makes it easy to estimate the cost of your thermal device printing solutions, particularly as you start to scale. It can help businesses prevent waste and overspending due to overstocking supplies and avoid the extra charges involved in expedited fulfilment that occur after you unexpectedly run out of stock.
In addition, T-MPS can help you avoid overspending on unnecessary thermal printers by analyzing their performance data and determining the best location for each thermal printer on-site. They can also send you a notification when a device is approaching its end and help you get appropriate replacement solutions for it.
Using thermal managed printer services does not just significantly decrease the costs associated with your printer fleet and supplies, but it also reduces the risk of other costs, including the burden on your IT department, fragmented and time-consuming procurement, operational inefficiencies, and risk to business sustainability.
With T-MPS, a business’s print-related budget will become more predictable, its procurement process will become streamlined, its devices will become manageable, and labelling workflows will become uninterrupted.
Learn more about industry-leading thermal printers from Zebra Technologies, and how we can partner with you to help your organization perform at its best.
