March 5, 2019. My article “Digital Transformation of the Printing Process: What Do We Have Today?” went live on IT Channel News.
In 2019, the word “digitalization” was on everyone’s lips at every other conference. People talked about AI, cloud, big data. And I wrote about printing. Because that’s exactly where — in office document management — digital transformation was happening invisibly. And invisibly meant expensively.
The core idea of the article is simple: printing stopped being just “press a button, get a page” a long time ago. It’s a full-fledged business process that can and should be automated, monitored, and optimized. And by 2019, there were already plenty of tools to do exactly that.
I broke down five of them:
MDS services — this is where a company’s entire document workflow is handed over to a single outsourced provider. Not just printing, but document storage, routing, security, and full monitoring. The chaotic “zoo” of mismatched printers becomes one unified, managed system.
ID card printing — a document only comes out of the printer when the employee taps their personal card. No more stacks of forgotten pages piling up in the tray by end of day. No more confidential documents accidentally picked up by the wrong person. Full visibility into who prints what and how much.
Per-copy service contracts — you pay only for actual prints. No headaches over repairs, consumables, or spare parts — it’s all built into the price per page. Accounting is happy, IT is free to focus on actual work.
Document digitization — not just “scan the paperwork.” It means a structured archive with navigation, file routing, and automatic delivery to the right folders for the right people. Documents stop getting lost.
Continuous print audit — software that collects real-time data from thousands of devices, logs incidents, and lets you get ahead of problems instead of reacting to them after the fact.
The main conclusion I drew at the time: no solution can be chosen without a proper audit first. Company size, office layout, document volume — all of it shapes the decision. But when the right choice is made, the results are tangible: lower costs, less time wasted, and far more control.