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Tips to speed up printing and document sharing in your office

Discover the art of better productivity in your office with these top tips to speed up printing and document sharing in your office.

At Sharp, we’re committed to improving office life with products that are easy and quick to use, that connect to each other and help people to work smarter. We are experts in continually improving our products because we listen to what people need. Earlier this year we interviewed over 6,000 European office workers about the technology they use at work and how it sometimes lets them down.

We found that the average worker wastes 19 days each year due to slow or ineffective technology. The following issues were the top time wasters: slow warm-up times of printers, inconsistent file storage and bad document management.

On average, 12 minutes and 51 seconds a day are spent searching for documents and a further 9 minutes and 22 seconds searching for images on server. Not quite as bad is the time wasted on printing – 6 minutes and 25 seconds are spent waiting for printer to warm up, while a further 8 minutes and 46 seconds are spent waiting for documents to print.

Add all this together and you have a staggering 13 hours a month wasted by each European employee searching for documents and waiting for printers alone.

With that in mind, we asked time management expert Clare Evans (author of the best-selling title Time Management for Dummies), to provide some tips and advice that every office can try. To see those tips, download our white paper called “How to unlock the 19 days wasted annually by everyone in your office”.

Speed-up Printing Times

At Sharp, we’re developing time-saving features into our devices. The latest Sharp MX Multi-Functional Printers (MFPs) offer a host of features to improve workflow, optimise employee productivity and enhance business profitability. From Motion Sensors that warm the printer up as you step towards it, to Office Direct Print, which allows you to print any document straight from USB.

For even greater flexibility, the Sharpdesk Mobile app lets you print wirelessly from your phone or tablet to a supported MFP, without having to log on to a network or wait for your laptop to start up.

Enhance Document Management

Sharing files with colleagues is standard across all business types but this can lead to a range of problems, from having to ask them to email you a file, to keeping on top of the latest amends, which can often lead to a waste of time.

Using a cloud-based file storage and sharing service to save and store files is key to reducing time wasting in such situations. Sharp Cloud Portal Office is our cloud-based light document management system. To store documents, people can save their digital files straight to folders in the cloud, or scan them in from a Sharp multi-functional printer (MFP). Scanned documents are indexed at the MFP and you can also index any stored document through the Desktop Sync feature, adding searchable tags to make files easy to find.

Learn more