Ever since its invention in ancient China, paper has long since been a staple medium for conveying information in physical form, and despite the rise of the Internet and e-mail, paper is still critical for nearly every business or company today that has a physical location (bloggers and other online workers may not need paper, but most workers do). Many statistics are compiled to show just how relevant and effective paper still is, and financial reports, memos, meeting records, and much more will be printed and stored on paper. Sometimes, paper documents will fill up an office and will need to be scanned and uploaded digitally, and special services can be hired for that. In the meantime, a company that needs a lot of printers can either buy them themselves or hire print management services when a lot of documents such as flyers are being made. An electronic document is useful, but for other jobs, printers take center stage. What is a company to do?

Printers and Paper

Despite e-mail and the Internet, paper documents are still very useful in today’s office and for communicating with the general public. The advantages of printing technology are clearly seen when specialized documents are made, such as flyers on attractive colored paper, colored images printed on card stock to make posters, and much more. Some forms of advertising are most effective on paper, such as posters inside a store promoting upcoming events or items for sale, and a poster can be very attractive and get everyone’s attention. In other cases, flyers can be posted all over a city and handed out to raise awareness of new products, sales, or events. Today, many people are in fact exhausted by constant electronic communication such as e-mail, pop-up ads, and videos, and such digital media is sometimes used to maliciously spread computer viruses or spybots, but no paper flyer ever spread a computer virus, and paper advertisement methods can be seen as a welcome break from electronic screens. And in a store, customers are bound to be looking everywhere and they will see posters, flyers, and paper price tags everywhere that are designed to grab their attention.

Printers can be used on a small scale within a business such as printing financial reports or memos, but if a lot of printers or more specialized printers are needed, such as making a large and colorful poster, this work can be outsourced to print services. The benefit of print services is that the client can pay a fee to get a professional grade printing job done without needing to invest in an expensive and bulky printer, and this can be a lucrative partnership for everyone involved. A number of major brand names for printing services are known, and smaller ones may exist all over the country. Printer solutions may not be far away when a business needs to print thousands of flyers or a huge, fancy poster for advertising.

Managing Paper

Printers of all kinds the right tool for creating all kinds of documents, but once an office space has printed off a lot of paper, problems may arise. An excess of paper means that documents may often be lost or misfiled, and finding or reproducing these documents is both expensive and time-consuming, something that no manager wants. In fact, an average of four weeks or so is lost every year waiting for mislabeled, misfiled, or untracked documents, and that can add up fast. The Garter Group has also determined that around 15% of paper documents are misplaced and 7.5% are lost entirely. What is more, even a correctly filed paper is not accessible to workers who work remotely, such as those at home or those on a business trip.

The solution is document digitization. Papers can be scanned and uploaded en masse when a scanner crew is hired, and all these documents can be stored in the company’s data server or in its Cloud storage account. This makes it much easier and faster for remote workers and managers to access the documents that they need, saving a lot of time and work. Reduced paper also means an eliminated fire hazard and a lot of room being opened up for other uses, a serious convenience for those at the office every day.