If you’re looking for managed print services in New York City (MPS), you may be wondering if New Jersey businesses might offer equal or better services that are less expensive than those offered by providers based in Manhattan. Research indicates that yes, you can get better, less expensive MPS from a New Jersey-based vendor and that it is becoming increasingly necessary for you to get control of those costs. Printed products and managed services are growing in popularity across almost all industrial sectors in both the New York City region and the country.
Managed Print Services on the Rise
Despite the apparent digitization of virtually everything, printed materials are still not only in demand, but demand for them is growing, too. According to the industry group Printing Industries of America (PIA), the printing and graphics communications sector experienced a 1.5 percent growth over the fiscal year 2017 and is expecting future growth to approach, if not surpass 3.0 percent. PIA leadership surmises that the digital revolution is definitely impacting how the commercial print industry does its business regarding critical skills, technology, labor force and value proposition.
At the same time, those technical disruptors are also changing the strategies around how companies manage their printing services and products. While new avenues of communication open new channels for printed products, the means of creation and replication of those products can involve completely different technologies or more advanced technologies than what has been used in the past.
And simply adding new machines or programming is often an insufficient response to these challenges. Often, the complexity of both the products and the system require a strategic realignment of print resources to maximize outputs while minimizing expenses and costs. Traditional print systems are simply not able to match the high quality of newer print methods and technicians skilled on traditional machines might not have the knowledge needed to master the incoming digitally-enhanced capacity.
What this means to businesses is that printing technology and processing are becoming increasingly sophisticated and the capacity to manage these assets needs to improve to meet those new standards. To be competitive in the print industry, or when using printed products for commercial purposes, almost every company must relearn how they manage their entire printing process to maintain competitiveness.
Costs Related to Location
For businesses located in Manhattan and other NYC Boroughs, the costs associated with those MPS developments may be too prohibitive to be viable. New York City (NYC) is known to be significantly more expensive as a place to do business than its surrounding non-NYC neighbors, and managed print services in NYC must not only absorb those higher costs but usually also pass them along to their customers.
In New Jersey, however, those costs go down as the local business communities share with their customers the benefits of working outside the metropolitan center:
- Electricity is 30 to 50 percent more expensive in Manhattan than it is in New Jersey and high volume print projects will generate equally high volumes of electricity expense.
- Tax rates are also lower in New Jersey than in New York City. Some areas of New York City have tax rates as high as nine percent.
- Many New Jersey communities also provide local businesses with significant incentives to do business in their area and those corporations, including managed print services providers, can offer their customers reduced costs for the same quality of product that can be obtained at more expensive rates from an NYC-based provider.
- Not insignificantly, New Jersey also rewards its in-state enterprises that provide jobs and make capital investments in the state. MPS providers pass these savings on to their customers, too.
Embracing New Jersey-based Managed Print Services
Finding your MPS provider in New Jersey rather than New York City won’t diminish the quality of the work you’ll receive, either. Many New Jersey-based MPS providers take the savings they enjoy from their less expensive location and invest those in the technologies and skills that allow them to surpass the quality of work offered anywhere else, including NYC:
- Many companies add printers and printing devices without thought to the strategy of optimizing those investments. Consequently, they find themselves with an array of unmatched and unmanaged assets that don’t work to their optimal capacity as a network and often don’t provide even the minimal service expected of them individually. With a dedicated focus solely on the managed print service, providers in New Jersey can bring under control the most unmanaged of print environments, maximizing those investments and enhancing their value to corporate print capabilities.
- Too often, those unmanaged printer systems also generate excessive and hidden expenses in repair and maintenance costs. Workers who expect timely delivery of their print projects sometimes have to wait while repairs delay production or shut down production altogether. That wasted time also generates wasted productivity, which adds another cost factor to the problem. Those lost time and productivity costs often don’t show up on the expense record but definitely cost the business time and money.
With competition as fierce as it is in today’s global markets, no company should pay more for services simply because their providers are based in a high-cost neighborhood. It’s too expensive to pay for managed print services in NYC when you can get the same high-quality services at reduced prices from your friendly, neighborhood New Jersey MPS provider.
