Just like any other hardware, printers aren’t perfect. Anyone who spends enough time in an office has had to deal with a faulty printer outputting documents wrong or jamming at the most inopportune time.
For office managers and the executives to whom they are accountable, it is expensive, preventable downtime. With the right approach to regular printer maintenance, the entire office can enjoy access to high-quality prints with virtually zero frustration.
A minor investment in the appropriate tools and training is all it takes to guarantee problem-free printer performance for years to come. Keeping a printer maintenance kit handy can eliminate imaging downtime entirely.
Why Do Printers Break Down in the First Place?
Office technology has made drastic leaps forward since the first copying machines came on the market. It stands to reason that paper jams should be a thing of the past.
The fact is that paper jams are likely to persist for years to come. Printers are complex machines that feature many moving parts. Those parts have to work in perfect order in order to produce reliable results. Minute paper particles and worn-out components can easily disrupt any one of the dozens of tiny, precise movements that printers perform when outputting documents.
Even perfectly calibrated, multi-million dollar printing presses can jam. Sometimes, the paper itself is the culprit. There is no uniform quality-control standard in the paper industry, and even if there were, it would not be able to adequately accommodate the natural differences in various trees and the wood pulp they produce.
Offices are not likely to enjoy jam-free printing until a perfectly uniform paper substitute becomes commercially viable. In the meantime, investing in printer maintenance kits can help mitigate the risk of printer downtime effectively.
What Does a Printer Maintenance Kit Contain?
Your printer’s maintenance tool kit contains spare parts and components that you may need to replace when your printer reaches a certain usage threshold. Since printers rely on a large number of moving parts, wear and tear are inevitable. Your printer maintenance kit contains the parts most likely to require replacement during the printer’s life span.
Every printer manufacturer performs extensive tests to determine which components break down most commonly. They analyze printer performance to determine which components to include in their maintenance tool kits. For instance, a laser printer maintenance kit may include the following:
• Fuser Assembly. The printer fuser uses heat to fuse laser toner to the paper. Laser toner is a powder, and that powder may combine with dust and accumulate inside the fuser assembly.
• Transfer Roller. This component also called a transfer belt, is responsible for transferring printed images onto the paper and sending them further to the fuser assembly for finishing. This component may stop working if its path is obstructed or if it doesn’t have easy access to the paper.
• Cooling Fan. Printers generate heat, and they need to adequately vent that heat away. Cooling fans can break down when obstructed, which leads to printer overheating. A broken cooling fan may lead to temperatures that damage all of the other components inside the printer.
• Feeding Unit. The feeding unit is responsible for inputting paper into the print system. It is the first component to physically act on the paper in the print system, and as a result, it is uniquely susceptible to environmental issues like dust accumulation and humidity.
Outsource Printer Maintenance to a Managed Print Vendor
Many office managers successfully implement policies for training office employees to adequately identify and resolve a broad range of printer issues. Offices that keep printer maintenance kits ready for employees to use enjoy a unique advantage – many of these parts are user-serviceable in modern printers.
But there will always be components and accessories that are not user-serviceable. Whenever technology fails to deliver results, productivity suffers. Having on-demand access to best-in-class print hardware expertise and service is the best way to ensure that print downtime doesn’t occur.
Managed print services allow organizations to leverage industry-standard technical expertise on an as-needed basis without having to dedicate their own in-house IT talent to the process. This allows them to commit IT resources to higher-impact processes while reducing the cost of preventative maintenance.
Your managed print service vendor can help you deploy printer maintenance kits at your most mission-critical devices. This can reduce service call frequency and improve uptime, leading to better productivity across the board.
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