If you asked your CFO right now what your company spends on printing, they'd probably guess. Then guess again. The honest answer is that most businesses have no idea, because print costs don't live in one place. Hardware shows up on one budget line, toner on another, IT service calls somewhere else entirely. Nobody owns the total number.
That's exactly the problem managed print services (MPS) was built to solve. A provider takes over your entire print environment including devices, supplies, maintenance, monitoring, for a single predictable monthly cost. One agreement, one cost per page, no more hunting across spreadsheets to figure out what the printers are actually costing you.
MPS is not a copier lease. It's not a toner delivery service. It's not a break-fix contract. Each of those covers a slice of your print environment. MPS covers all of it. Managed print services is an ongoing service agreement in which a provider takes full responsibility for your print environment including devices, supplies, maintenance, and monitoring for a flat cost per page.
Under a lease, you own the obligation to pay for the hardware. Under MPS, you pay for output (pages printed) and the provider is responsible for keeping the equipment running, stocked, and up to date. If a machine fails, service is dispatched. If the toner runs low, it ships automatically. If a firmware vulnerability is identified, it's patched. All of that is part of the agreement, not a separate billable event.
The business case usually becomes clear when companies add up what printing actually costs them. Hardware costs, supply costs, IT time spent troubleshooting printer problems, and service calls for machines that break down, those expenses typically live in separate budget lines owned by different departments. When they're consolidated, the total surprises most people. To see how those numbers benchmark across industries, the MPS cost savings statistics page breaks down average spend by business type.
A print assessment is the starting point for any MPS conversation. For most businesses, it's the first honest look they've ever taken at what their print environment actually costs them.
Standley System’s assessments are free and non-invasive. Our team maps the network and inventories every device connected to it: printers, copiers, multifunction devices, desktop inkjets. We capture usage data for each device, including pages printed per month, cost per page, service history, toner consumption, and fleet age.
The output is a print environment report that shows you cost per page by device, total estimated print spend, where you're printing versus where work actually happens, and which machines are overloaded or underused. You keep that report regardless of what you decide to do next. The assessment isn't a sales pitch, it's a diagnostic. If the numbers don't make a case for MPS, you'll know that going in.
Most businesses have more printers than they need and still don't have the right coverage.
The pattern is predictable: desktop inkjets in every office because they were cheap to buy, shared copiers placed for convenience rather than workflow, and a handful of aging machines that haven't been replaced because no one tracks their per-page cost. The fleet grew by accumulation rather than design, which is why the same machines keep generating service tickets.
Device consolidation replaces that with a right-sized fleet. Fewer devices, better placed, sized to actual print volumes. High-capacity workgroup multifunction printers (MFPs) handle the volume that clusters of desktop printers currently handle less efficiently. Devices are positioned based on where work happens, not where there was empty counter space.
Great Plains Bank — which now operates 28 banking centers across Oklahoma and North Texas — managed more than 250 printers across its network before working with Standley. The fleet had grown alongside the bank as it expanded roughly tenfold over two decades, and service response from their previous vendor averaged around five days. After switching to Standley's managed model with proactive coverage, that came down to 30 minutes. J.R. Mills, the bank's CIO, estimates his team reclaimed up to six hours a week that had previously gone to printer management.
Remote monitoring tracks every device in your fleet continuously: toner levels, error states, usage patterns, firmware versions. When something is about to fail or a consumable is running low, the system flags it before it becomes a problem for the person trying to print. Service calls are dispatched proactively, not reactively.
Usage reporting gives you visibility into what the fleet is actually doing: which departments print most, at what cost, on which devices. That data feeds the quarterly reviews where fleet adjustments are made. Security and compliance updates are handled as part of the agreement; printer firmware is a real attack surface, and keeping it current is part of routine maintenance under MPS.
Help desk escalations are removed from your IT queue. In environments without MPS, printer-related calls can account for a significant share of internal IT tickets; tickets that get resolved, recur, and get resolved again without ever fixing the underlying problem. MPS removes that category of issue from your IT team entirely.
For businesses with multiple locations, remote monitoring is where MPS is maybe its most valuable. A company with offices in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Fort Worth can't realistically have someone checking on printers across all three. Remote monitoring handles that centrally. When a device approaches a threshold that typically precedes a failure like a drum near end of life, a fuser showing wear, a high-volume machine burning through toner faster than the schedule anticipates, the system flags it and triggers a service response before the device goes down.
Under Standley's auto-replenishment program, toner ships when the device signals it's running low. Not when someone notices the warning light and submits a request. Not on a fixed monthly schedule that may or may not match actual usage. The device tracks its own supply level and orders what it needs when it needs it.
That eliminates the last-minute supply scramble when a machine runs dry mid-job. It also eliminates the opposite problem: bulk toner orders that sit in a supply room, exceed their shelf life, and get thrown away. The auto-replenishment program aligns supply shipments to actual device consumption — no overstocking, no stockouts. Meter automation also feeds accurate billing: because usage is tracked at the device level, cost-per-page invoices reflect what was actually printed rather than relying on manual reads or estimates.
MPS is almost universally priced on a cost-per-page (CPP) model. You pay a flat rate per page printed. That rate covers supplies, service, and monitoring so there's no separate invoice when a technician comes out, and no separate supply order when toner runs low. One rate, all in.
The number of devices in your fleet, your monthly print volume, your color-to-monochrome ratio (color pages carry a higher per-page cost), and the number of locations under the agreement all impact your MPS rate. A business printing 50,000 pages a month across four locations spread out over Oklahoma and North Texas will have a different rate than a single-location office printing 4,000 pages.
Print budgets in unmanaged environments are difficult to forecast because supply, service, and hardware costs fluctuate independently. CPP replaces that with a fixed cost per page, which is the same rate whether the month generates two service calls or ten, and regardless of how quickly a high-volume device burns through toner.
Not sure what MPS would cost for your business? A free assessment gives you the exact numbers before any conversation about contracts even come up.
Assessment to go-live typically runs a few weeks. The assessment itself is quick: a network scan that doesn't require IT preparation. From there, Standley works through fleet design, device placement, CPP rate, and service terms before moving into deployment, which may involve installing new equipment and removing underperforming machines.
Once monitoring is live, Standley conducts on-site quarterly business reviews for each account. Those reviews cover usage data, cost trends, device performance, and whether the fleet still fits how the business operates. If a department has grown, if a device’s location has moved, if print volumes have shifted, the quarterly review catches it.
The standard industry model is to deploy equipment, set up monitoring, and respond when something breaks. A company in the energy sector that recently moved from a national provider to Standley noted they had gone more than a year without an in-person account review under the previous agreement. Quarterly on-site reviews were a specific reason they made the switch to Standley.
Three rough qualifiers:
Any one of those typically means MPS will save your business more than it costs. If you have all three then the case is clear.
Healthcare, legal, and financial services businesses have additional reasons to consider MPS beyond cost. Regulated document handling, print security (secure release printing, audit trails), and firmware compliance all become more important when the print environment touches protected health information (PHI), client files, or financial records.
Standley serves medical practices in Oklahoma City, law firms in Tulsa, manufacturing operations in Chickasha, and businesses across the Dallas-Fort Worth metro, each with different primary drivers for moving to a managed model, but all with fleets that benefit from the same core structure.
Managing a distributed fleet without MPS means either over-relying on IT or accepting that print environments at smaller or remote locations are essentially unmanaged. For more on evaluating providers, our guide on choosing an MPS provider walks through the specific criteria worth comparing.
A print assessment tells you what your print environment actually costs and what a managed agreement would look like for your specific fleet, before you agree to anything. Standley's are free and take 30 to 60 minutes.
If you have five or more devices, operate more than one location, or have ever dealt with a last-minute supply scramble or an unexpected printer service invoice, the assessment will give you the numbers to make an informed decision.
Request a free print assessment. It takes less than an hour and produces a report you can use whether or not MPS turns out to be the right fit.