Managed print services (MPS) is a contract in which a company does not buy its printers. Instead, it pays a monthly bill, and the printer maker or one of its partners supplies, runs and repairs every printer and charges for each page printed. It is one kind of managed service, in which an outside company's staff run something for the customer.
How does it work? First, the provider surveys the company's existing printers and how much each one prints. Usually it finds many small printers of different makes, each with its own toner. It replaces them with fewer, shared multifunction printers that print, copy and scan. Second, every printer reports its page counters and toner levels over the network to the provider's software, every night. Third, when toner runs low, the provider ships a new cartridge before the old one runs out. When a printer breaks down, an engineer visits within a time fixed in the contract. Fourth, the monthly bill is the number of pages printed multiplied by the agreed rate for each page. This makes it a form of usage-based billing.
Consider an insurance company with its head office in Lucknow and 40 branch offices across Uttar Pradesh. Before MPS, it owned 180 printers of 11 different models, and each branch ordered its own toner. Some branches ran out of toner during the busy last week of March. Under a five-year contract, the provider replaces the 180 printers with 70 MFPs. The rates are 45 paise for each black-and-white page and ₹4 for each colour page, with toner, spare parts and repairs included. In October, the 70 printers report 1,60,000 black-and-white pages and 9,000 colour pages. The black-and-white pages cost ₹72,000 and the colour pages cost ₹36,000, so October's bill is ₹1,08,000. When a branch printer's toner falls below 15%, a new cartridge is couriered to the branch without anyone asking.
Why do companies choose MPS? They pay nothing up front for the printers. They know the cost of every page in advance. Nobody in the office has to order toner or call for repairs. They also receive reports of who prints what. In the example above, the reports showed that one department printed most of the colour pages. The company then set colour printing to need a manager's approval, and colour pages fell in the following months.
There are trade-offs. The company is tied to one provider for the length of the contract, usually three to five years. Most contracts also have a minimum monthly charge, which is billed even in a month when the offices print very little.
The printers send their counters over the company's own office network, so the provider's software needs a small, secure connection out of that network. The same idea of paying for use instead of owning the machine appears in many other industries; see hardware-software disaggregation for one example.