Futureproofing business with Brother

In what is likely to be one of the most enduring side effects of the pandemic, employees and organisations across the UK have felt the benefit of less commuting and more work-life balance.

With this, the more flexible employers can be, there is a realisation that they can be more effective. That means equipping people with solutions to remain productive, wherever they may be.

That includes an all-round resilient, flexible print solution that works at home, in a co-working hub, or in the office.

How Brother and Complete IT Systems help

Brother can tick all the boxes. For home users, Brother users can benefit from compact multifunction desktop devices that enable simple and secure printing and scanning.

In the office, touch-free decentralised printing means staff can reduce the risk of infection, respect social distancing and improve productivity at the same time.

In the hub, Brother’s print and scan devices mean you can create documents for meetings in serviced offices, for
example, without having to send them to shared printers using unfamiliar networks.

Remote IT support desk services, with a team of experts who can resolve any issues remotely, wherever they are.

Brother are working to design bespoke print solutions that are making businesses more resilient and ready to take on whatever challenges and opportunities the future might bring.

See how other organisations are adapting

To understand its importance, Brother UK recruited an expert panel of IT decision-makers, academics, and advisors to look at how firms are introducing new technology to build business resilience. Those businesses with robustness and agility will be best placed to survive both short-term shocks and longer periods of uncertainty.

The report helps in highlighting the role technology must play and help IT decision-makers with the choices they make in enabling their organisations to futureproof.

Find out more

Get in touch to find out how Brother solutions can help you improve your business’s resilience.

Using print to deliver built-in flexibility to your business

Software as a service (SaaS) brings a range of benefits over installed applications, including flexibility and scalability. And the service provider can update their software centrally without any downtime for users, so the latest updates and security patches are in place, bringing peace of mind that systems are as secure as possible.

Research from IDC found that, by 2021, over half of software revenue will come from software sold as subscription and software as a service.

Adrian Bradley, of KPMG, said: “With COVID-19, firms that were already using cloud-based solutions at a sufficient scale experienced no great problems as they were able to easily scale up their operations online.

“But organisations that didn’t have the basic infrastructure in place and were heavily dependent on their premises found they had more bottlenecks to resolve.

Using the cloud also narrows the sphere of responsibility. It plays into reliability, compliance, safety and business continuity so leaders can devote their energy to other issues.

“But, understandably, many firms have focused on continuity, not resilience, so they will need to transform further.”

Automated technologies can also help to build in flexibility and business resilience. Joanna Swash of Moneypenny said: “Our clients faced an unprecedented volume of calls at the onset of lockdown, as people wanted to know about refunds, bookings and orders amid the chaos.

Our digital products including live chat and switchboard technologies helped them to effectively keep on top of enquiries where there wasn’t the physical manpower, preventing customer relationships from being damaged.”

Find out

To understand its importance, Brother UK recruited an expert panel of IT decision-makers, academics, and advisors to look at how firms are introducing new technology to build business resilience. Those businesses with robustness and agility will be best placed to survive both short-term shocks and longer periods of uncertainty.

The report helps in highlighting the role technology must play and help IT decision-makers with the choices they make in enabling their organisations to become more resilient.

Find out more

Get in touch to find out how Brother solutions can help you improve your business’s resilience.

 

Time to focus on what counts

Brother UK recently conducted a survey of 501 IT leaders at UK SMEs. With many workers furloughed and hiring frozen, productivity has never been more important. In a series of articles this autumn, we are using the findings of the survey to see how UK businesses can improve productivity.

Our previous article addressed how smart leaders are investing to improve productivity. Here, we focus in on the investments that count the most, and can boost your business from survive to thrive mode during the coronavirus pandemic.

New ways of working

The changes that the whole world has seen during 2020 have been generation changing, and business is no different. While British businesses had begun a shift towards more flexible working arrangements even before the pandemic, the enforced changes and lockdowns have acted as a catalyst for making that process a lot quicker.

Reassuringly, Brother’s survey found that the majority of British SMEs are already underway with, or are readying plans to ramp up their IT investments. Underpinning this investment is the goal of improving productivity.

Technology and productivity

Of those IT leaders surveyed, it was clear that what counts is that users can continue to work as productively as possible – and in some cases even more so.

Four out of five of those leaders had active plans to invest in new technologies to support this drive for more productive working. So much so, that more than half (57%) also said that remote working has already provided productivity gains in their business. As a result, a comprehensive 82% stated that further technology investments are planned to support leaders and facilitate home working even further.

Focusing on what counts

Having identified technology as a means to underpin productivity gains, the leaders were then surveyed more specifically on what technologies would be the priority for their valuable budgets. Remote working tools (84%) and collaboration software (80%) came out on top, with modern hardware including printers also ranking highly on the list (75%).

It was also refreshing to see that not all the IT leaders felt the need to think only in emergency mode – far from it. In fact, 79% of those surveyed stated that the desire to experiment with tech was one of the main driving factors in their firms’ planned strategic IT investments over the next 12 months.

Find out more

In our next article in this series we will explore the SMB productivity puzzle in more detail. In the meantime, you can find out more with Brother UK’s handy guide – “a practical guide to productivity”.

Find out more

Give us a call on 01274 396 213 to find out how Complete IT Systems and Brother can help your business. Alternatively have a look at our main Brother information page here.

 

Printers & consumables for home workers during the COVID-19 crisis

Home office

Whether you’re looking for a quick solution for printers for homeworking during COVID-19 crisis, or you’re looking to deploy a more strategic print refresh, Complete IT Systems provide full range and expertise on printers and consumables.

We offer competitive prices, expertise on many lines of printers, inks and toners from all the major brands, in addition re-manufactured and compatible cartridges to fit all budgets and requirements – most lines are stocked and available on a next-day business delivery service.

From small desk based ink jet systems up to the high end departmental multi-function lasers, we have your requirements covered.

Find out more

Complete IT Systems Ltd have been providing these services to our customers for over 10 years and have many satisfied clients. For more information on how we can help, please call us on 01274 396 213 or read more about the print and consumables brands we carry here.

More guidance for businesses trying to quickly setup to enable homeworking is available here, and we’ll be publishing many more tips and guidance over the coming days and weeks.

Choosing the right printer for your business

There are many, many options out there and that is obviously a great thing – but it can make the process of choosing the best one for your business a little daunting! It’s not as simple as buying the first printer that fits your budget, and doing so could mean missing out on some useful features.

The dangers of long contracts on the balance sheet

More importantly, making the wrong decision could even have negative results for your business balance sheet, as some managed print contracts can prove very expensive and painful over 5 years. Over this time in this era of ever-improving technology, what was a new and state-of-the-art printer at the beginning of a 5 year contract may start to become a little clunky towards the end of that period.

The right printer for your business is therefore not only crucial to performance, productivity and efficiency, but to the bottom line!

So back to the main question – how to choose the right printer for your business.

Key questions to consider:

Functionality

  • How many employees do you have?
  • Do you need black and white or colour?
  • Do you need high quality printing for customer-facing documentation, or more basic quality for reviewing email drafts etc?
  • Paper size – A4, A3?
  • Will you need copying, scanning or fax facilities

Efficiency

While the price of the actual printer is an undoubted cost consideration, don’t forget to take into account the operational costs of the machine such as ink, paper, maintenance. The cheapest printer hardware price does not always factor in these operational costs – be sure to take total cost of ownership into account when budgeting for print.

Connectivity

Would it be of benefit to your workforce to be able to print directly from their mobile devices? The right print environment can make for huge productivity gains in this regard.

Security

In this era of unprecedented cyber security threats, GDPR and other regulation considerations, the need for strong security measures across your whole IT infrastructure, including print, has never been more prevalent. Some printers come with in-built ‘print release’ functionality which reduces the risk of stray documents being left laying around in error on a printer tray by ensuring a password is required in order to print sensitive documents.

So what printers suit your business best?

In this article, we’ve suggested some considerations that you’ll need to make when choosing your new printer. Even with these questions it may still be difficult to make that final decision, so here’s a few more things to take into account:

  • Everyone and every business uses a printer differently – there’s discrepancies between individuals and departments
  • A rough guide is that an small-to-medium sized organisation benefits from having one printer for every 7-10 people
  • Understand maintenance and running costs before entering into any long-term contracts

As Canon Authorised Partners, Complete IT Systems are able to offer you leading guidance on your organisation’s print environment to achieve best value for money, results and reliability.

Give us a call today on 01274 396 213 or email  to talk to one of our print specialist team.