Paper waste is high in the United States – and in many other places all around the world – there is no doubt about that. In fact, nearly twenty percent of everything that is printed in total in this country is directly contributing to the growing problem of waste, according to stopwaste.org. And as the typical office worker – no matter in what industry – in the United States will use a total of as many as ten thousand individual sheets of paper in just one year, an insurmountable amount of paper is wasted needlessly. Fortunately, management printing services provide a viable solution for many – if not all – office settings. With as much as eighty five percent of all companies still primarily using paper, the paper waste and lack of office efficiency is severe and is drastically in need of a major full system change.

Because not only do managed printing services curb the need for a great deal of paper office supplies and office items, reducing the waste that each office space contributes to the environment, managed printing services also help to increase the efficiency of an office as well, perhaps the biggest benefits of incorporating a managed printing services company into the office space. First of all, managed printing services are effective at cutting costs for offices. Behind rent and payroll, the two biggest expenses that any office is likely to have, it has even been found that printer costs and copier costs are a huge money suck each and ever month for the standard company in the United States. Switching to managed printing solutions can bring an end to this unnecessary waste of not only paper and paper products, but of money. In fact, with each and every average employee in the United States accruing as much as one thousand and three hundred dollars in printer costs (and around six hundred dollars at a bare minimum per year) each and every year, managed printing services have a huge potential to help to cut spending and save money with the simple implementation of print service management.

Managed printing services will also help companies to regain a great deal of efficiency, as fully paper systems have been found to be just the opposite and even hugely inefficient. In fact, in the typical full paper system if no print management software in place, the typical employee is likely to waste nearly twenty percent of their working hours simply by looking for information and struggling to find it. This struggle to find information is far from uncommon in offices with fully paper systems, as it is estimated that as many as four weeks of productive company time is lost on an annual basis, directly thanks to misfiled, misplaced, and altogether lost documents. In terms of the paper documents themselves, nearly one fifth of all paper documents (fifteen percent, to be more exact) are misplaced, and more than seven percent in total are lost completely, never to be recovered. With managed printing services, this is far less likely of a thing to occur, if even possible at all.

And the cost of lost and misplaced documents is certainly not a small one. Though each misfiled document will cost the company on average only around twenty dollars each, this is a cost that all too easily adds up and compounds over time. If fifteen percent of all paper documents are misfiled in the typical office setting, this ends up being a more than considerable amount of money that is ultimately lost for good, even if the document itself is finally recovered and then subsequently correctly filed in the end. But the cost on productivity is even higher, with as much as one hundred and twenty five extra dollars wasted in lost productivity for each misfiled document, as office employees must take time out of their work day to try and locate it, particularly if it was a paper document of significant importance, one that cannot be afforded to be permanently lost.

Paper filing can be hugely costly, and alternatives, like managed printing services, should be strongly considered.