A restaurant chain in the UK wanted to know how many printers it had. Auditors visited every location to count every printer by hand. It took seven weeks and cost £100,000.

It was incredibly inaccurate: at least 30% of printers were not counted. Imagine investing all those resources to end up with numbers you can’t trust. Manual printer audits are so cumbersome that 90% of organizations don’t know how many printers they have.

How many mobile and industrial printers do you have? Find out with SOTI Connect.

Five Reasons Why It’s Difficult to Manage Printer Assets

An average mobile rugged printer is about 120 mm x 180 mm x 80 mm. The average warehouse is around 17,500 sq. ft. It takes 15 minutes to manually audit a single printer.

Keeping that in mind, here are five reasons why managing printer assets – no matter how big or small they are – is difficult:

1. Printers often move locations or change networks without any notice or documentation. They just…disappear.

2. Printers may be purchased by employees independent of organizational requirements. They aren’t accounted for, and these rogue printers fall through the cracks.

3. Printers can be in remote or hard-to-reach areas. They quickly become forgotten, neglected or ignored.

4. The risk of devices being overlooked in a manual count is high. That risk increases as people get fatigued during auditing.

5. There’s no way to properly determine the status of a printer unless someone is standing right in front of it.

What Happens Without Asset Management?

If an organization has 5,000 thermal printers but 30% are missed, that’s 1,500 unaccounted printers. Assuming the average thermal printer costs around $350 USD, here’s what’s next:

• Try to maintain printing operations. But that’s difficult, if not impossible.

• Hope there’s $525,000 of swap stock inventory sitting around, readily accessible and in good working order to keep printing operations at optimum levels.

• Purchase printers to address the shortfall. That doesn’t find the missing printers though.

• Perform another count. If the first audit didn’t catch them, what guarantee is there that the second audit will?

These “solutions” cost time and money. They impact productivity. And, they don’t locate the missing printers.

Experience More Efficient Asset Management With SOTI Connect

Could you walk through a warehouse or a chain of retail stores and count every printer without missing any?

Probably not. But SOTI Connect can. That’s because it automatically discovers printers once they join your network and groups them. When printers switch networks, SOTI Connect tracks them.

Knowing if a printer is “here” or “there” can be the difference between being compliant or facing a penalty. It’s the difference between delivering a great customer experience or a poor one. It’s the difference between saving or spending money.

Discover how, with speed and accuracy, SOTI Connect tells you how many printers you have and where they’re located.