How a Managed Print Solution Can Help Your Business

A managed print solution outsources the day-to-day work of running your print environment, ordering supplies, maintaining equipment, and monitoring output, to a dedicated provider. Businesses that make the switch typically see three results: less strain on their IT team, lower print costs, and a smaller environmental footprint.

Print doesn’t feel like a strategic priority until it becomes one. A jammed printer eats up an afternoon. A toner order gets missed before a big proposal is due. A print budget quietly creeps past what anyone expected. None of these problems are dramatic on their own, but together they pull time and money away from the work that actually grows your business.

That’s the gap a managed print solution is built to close.

What Is a Managed Print Solution?

A managed print solution is a service that takes over the equipment, supplies, and support behind your print environment so your team doesn’t have to manage it in-house. Instead of buying and maintaining printers, tracking toner levels, and fielding help desk tickets, you work with a provider who handles the entire print process and reports back on usage and cost.

For many businesses, this looks like shifting from owned print equipment to on-demand printing: producing exactly what you need, when you need it, without warehousing extra inventory or overbuying supplies. Print is also rarely the only function businesses hand off this way. It tends to show up alongside other tasks that make sense to outsource once a business outgrows doing everything in-house.

How Does Managed Print Reduce the Burden on Your IT Team?

IT departments already juggle a full plate: managing databases, monitoring security, and responding to whatever breaks first. Printers tend to fall into that last category. A paper jam or an empty cartridge shouldn’t require a ticket to your IT team, but it often does.

Handing print management to a dedicated provider removes that low-value, high-frequency work from your IT staff’s plate. Fewer devices to maintain means fewer support tickets, less time spent reloading toner, and a cleaner office overall. That frees your IT team to focus on the priorities that actually require their expertise, like security and infrastructure.

It also isn’t just about clearing tickets. According to Quocirca’s MPS Landscape Study 2025, 89% of IT decision-makers believe managed print is important to their digital transformation initiatives, and 43% call it very important. Businesses aren’t outsourcing print because it’s a nuisance. They’re doing it because print has become part of a bigger digital strategy.

How Much Can a Managed Print Solution Save Your Business?

Cost is usually the first question business owners ask, and it’s a fair one. Unmanaged print environments tend to hide their true cost across scattered line items: devices, toner, service calls, and the employee hours spent handling all three. A managed print solution consolidates those costs into a single, predictable relationship with one provider.

The demand for that predictability is growing. According to the same Quocirca study, 71% of IT decision-makers expect their investment in managed print services to increase over the coming year, up sharply from the year before. That’s a signal that businesses are finding real, ongoing value in outsourcing print, not just testing it out.

Beyond the equipment and supply costs, a managed print solution frees up employee time. Every hour your staff spends untangling a printer problem is an hour they’re not spending on the work you actually pay them to do. When you outsource your print production, that time goes back to your team, the same way it does when businesses adopt other tools built to save time and cut manual work.

Is Managed Print More Sustainable Than In-House Printing?

Yes, in most cases. When you print only what you need instead of running large batches “just in case,” you cut down on wasted paper, ink, and energy. A managed print solution also gives you visibility into exactly what your business is printing, which makes it easier to spot waste and adjust before it adds up.

That reporting matters as much as the printing itself. You can’t reduce what you can’t see, and most in-house print setups don’t track usage closely enough to know where the waste is happening. That same visibility helps when print is part of a broader marketing strategy, since it’s easier to plan a campaign’s print volume when you already know your baseline.

Signs Your Business Might Need a Managed Print Solution

Not every business needs to make this switch today, but a few signs tend to show up before the decision becomes obvious:

• Your IT team spends more time on printer maintenance than on strategic projects.
• You’re not sure what your business actually spends on print each month.
• You’re printing in large batches to avoid reordering, and some of it goes unused.
• Your office has more printers or copiers than you can account for.
• You need materials delivered across multiple locations and print inconsistently between them.

If any of that sounds familiar, it’s worth taking a closer look at what a managed print solution could do for your business. This is especially common among growing small businesses that don’t have a dedicated IT or facilities team to absorb print-related work in the first place.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

Switching from in-house printing to a managed print solution is a real operational change, but the payoff shows up quickly. To recap, a managed print solution can help your business:

• Free up your IT team from low-value, high-frequency print maintenance
• Consolidate scattered print costs into one predictable relationship
• Reduce paper, ink, and energy waste through on-demand production
• Give you clear visibility into what your business actually prints and spends

Every successful business is looking for ways to run leaner without cutting corners. Print is one of the easier places to start.

See how on-demand printing works and get started with Mimeo.