Print Supply Management Made Easy

Years after industry observers first predicted a move toward “paperless” offices, printing is still a key component of many businesses’ operations. And while other technologies always seem to be getting simpler and more user-friendly, print environments often remain stubbornly complex.

Learn how CDW Managed Print Services can simplify printing for your organization.

Perhaps the greatest share of print-related headaches comes from what feels like a relatively simple detail: supplying print devices with toner. All too often, businesses end up either with supply closets full of unlabeled toner boxes, or else a complete lack of toner when they critically need it (such as the day quarterly reports are set to be printed).

The current public health crisis has only exacerbated these problems, with skeleton crews struggling to support print environments in the office and many employees taking printers home with them. These are real problems that take up far too much of IT staffers’ time. CDW has three simple ways to help solve them.

Toner Fulfillment 101: Custom Ordering

If you go to Amazon and type “printer toner” into the search bar, you’ll end up with more than 20,000 results. Even for a specific print device, there are often several dozen options, and it can be difficult for IT departments to keep all their devices and supplies straight.

CDW offers organizations custom ordering pages, complete with their own URLs. When it’s time to order new supplies, business stakeholders can simply visit the website, where they will see icons for each of the print devices in their environment. After clicking on the appropriate device, users are given the option to order from an approved list of supplies. In many cases, this list will have only one item on it ― a high-yield toner cartridge, for example. This prevents errors and ensures that users have the correct supplies for the right devices.

Toner Fulfillment 201: Prompted Toner Ordering

We developed the Prompted Toner Ordering (PTO) toner fulfillment system specifically at the request of customers who require manual ordering, but who want this process to be dramatically simplified.

Quite often, IT departments are stuck ordering supplies (frequently as a result of other departments making mistakes in the past). We want to make this process as clean and easy as possible. The PTO system sends out content-rich and configurable low-toner alerts to relevant stakeholders, letting them know when supplies need to be restocked. Toner can then be ordered from the organization’s custom ordering page. All in all, this takes a previously complicated, time-consuming process and reduces it to mere minutes.

Customers that participate in the ordering program are often eligible for significant discounts on supplies.

Toner Fulfillment 301: Automated Toner Delivery

The Automated Toner Delivery (ATD) program was created at the request of CDW customers who wanted supply ordering and delivery to be as simple as possible ― with practically no action required on their part. Using a days-remaining algorithm, CDW tracks supply use and predicts future needs, then automatically delivers toner to businesses when they’ll need it. The program even features custom invoices to make life easy for accounts payable departments. ATD customers are typically eligible for the steepest discounts.

All three of these programs are complimentary. All feature free shipping (in the case of ATD, no-cost overnight shipping). Organizations can use their custom ordering pages to quickly ship supplies to employees who are working from home with organization-owned printers. And for the ATD program, we’ve even developed a triple-layer labeling process for print supplies, with information to help organizations route toner cartridges to the correct departments and devices.

If all of these solutions sound fairly simple and straightforward, they are. After all, that’s the point.