The Paperless Office Myth and How Managed Print Services Can Help

Every few years, someone declares that paper is dead. New software launches, a cloud platform gets adopted, and leadership sends a memo about “going paperless by Q3.” Six months later, the printer is still running, the paper tray still needs refilling every Tuesday, and nobody can quite explain why. In reality, the fully paperless office has been “five years away” for well over 50 years. The prediction first appeared in a 1975 Business Week article and is still being talked about. But according to a 2024 Quocirca study, only 11% of organizations surveyed reported being truly paperless. The other 89% are printing every day, and most of them have good reasons for it. For most businesses, the task is not eliminating print and paper, but using managed print services and setting realistic goals to reduce the (literal) paper trail.

Why Going Fully Paperless Is Harder Than It Sounds

Imagine a small law firm that has invested in a document management system, trained the staff, and committed to digital-only workflows. Then a client walks in and hands them a stack of signed paperwork. A court filing might still require a physical submission because the judge is an old-timer and doesn’t trust a flat-screen monitor.

The same scenario plays out across virtually every industry. Paper is everywhere because it’s relatively cheap, it’s convenient, and it leaves a physical trail of where it’s been. There’s also the human side of it, where people are naturally inclined to remember something more if they can physically feel it and see it written or printed on paper.

This is why over a third of all organizations in that Quocirca study have reported continuing to use paper documentation because their customers and partners are also using paper. It’s a never-ending cycle of passing printed docs back and forth.

The Real Problem – Lack of Printing Management

Here’s where most businesses actually lose money: not by printing, but by printing without any awareness of what it’s costing them.

Think about how many times a document gets printed in a typical office. Someone prints a draft for review. Edits come back, and they print it again. It gets shared with another department, so they print it as well. By the time a supposed final version is made, that single document might have been printed five or six times by a few different people, mostly in color, on devices where color output can cost three to five times more per page than black and white. The document was also likely never entered as an expense or tracked, and there’s hardly a proper policy on disposing of it, so it could just happen to be in someone’s bag when they leave work, beaming confidential data to the world.

This becomes even more surprising once you learn that roughly 15% of a company’s expenses are spent on documentation, with roughly a fifth of that figure going to printing itself. So printing is a tangible drain on your resources and also makes it more challenging to find the right file version on hand.

Of course, given how dependent we are on paper to maintain client connections, it’s practically impossible to just decide one day to stop printing altogether. A more sensible solution is to manage how much printing you do.

What Managed Print Services Actually Do

A managed print services (MPS) provider is exactly what it sounds like: a company that helps you manage your print environment, which includes the devices, the costs, the workflows, and the strategy behind all of it.

That starts with understanding what you actually need. A good MPS provider will assess your current setup, such as how many devices you have, how much each one is being used, what it’s costing you per page, and where the inefficiencies lie. From there, they help you right-size your fleet, set sensible defaults (like automatic double-sided printing and monochrome for everyday documents), and build a print environment that reflects how your business actually works instead of just accumulating devices over time.

The result is a relatively flat and much more predictable monthly cost of printing supplies and management fees instead of the chaos of discordant supply orders, repair invoices, and surprise toner runs that most businesses are used to. Once you know how much your printing system costs, you can develop a budgeting plan for it and create projections for the future.

And as a bonus, the “managed” part of managed print services extends to repairs, maintenance, and troubleshooting. When something goes wrong, all you have to do is call for the provider’s tech service and let your own IT department focus on their work.

But the part that surprises most businesses is what a modern MPS provider can do beyond the printers.

Combining Managed Print Services and Document Control

Many managed print providers have significantly expanded what they offer, and document management is now a major part of that offering.

Think back to the scenario from earlier – the document that gets printed five times because people are sharing it by printing it. The reason that happens isn’t that people love printing. It’s often the easiest way to share, review, and annotate a document when you don’t have a good digital system in place for doing those things.

When a managed print provider also offers managed IT and document management solutions, that problem gets solved at the source. Your documents are scanned and imported to a centralized, searchable digital system. When someone needs to review a contract, they can pull it up digitally. When changes are made, everyone is working from the same version. When a document needs to be shared with another department, it gets shared by clicking a button, not by printing, walking over, and plopping it onto a desk.

Of course, the scale and capabilities of the document system will depend on implementation, but with AI models, optical character recognition can now reliably transcribe text from low-quality scans.

Meanwhile, the printer is still there for the things that genuinely need to be printed, such as client-facing materials, compliance documents, physical sign-offs, or job site drawings. But the volume of unnecessary, redundant printing drops significantly because the workflow that was driving it has been replaced with something more efficient.

That’s the core idea behind a well-structured managed print relationship: it’s not about eliminating printing. It’s about making sure that every page you print is a page that actually needs to be printed, on a device that’s appropriate for the job, at a cost you understand and can predict.

So how does that translate into tangible results?

In some cases, managed print services can reduce the total cost of printing and managing documents by 30%. For larger businesses, the savings basically pay for the printing provider and allow you to keep them on retainer.

Finding the Right Managed Print Services Provider

Considering how important it is to manage your printing habits and pipelines, small businesses need a partner who has been in the business for decades and has kept up with advancing technologies. A company that’s also local to your base of operations additionally means you have minimal downtime waiting for technicians to come in case of a critical failure or issue.

That’s why companies across Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Yakima, Portland, Tri-Cities, Spokane, Bend, Salem, and Eugene have put their trust in Copiers Northwest as the region’s premier print services provider. With decades in the industry, Copiers Northwest can help you find (or build) a management solution that will fit your business needs and allow it to grow.

So, contact Copiers Northwest and get the only office tech solution source you’ll ever need.