Bidvest company, Konica Minolta South Africa has expanded its comprehensive software tool offering with a new, cost-effective print management solution, YSoft SafeQ, helping companies save up to 30% of their printing, copying and scanning costs.

The new print management solution enables each user to monitor and account for his/ her individual print usage and gives an organisation total control over its printing, copying and scanning operations.

According to Mohammed Vachiat, Konica Minolta South Africa's product manager, the company's Professional Services division performed a benchmarking exercise on a number of managed print services (MPS) software tools within the marketplace and these tests yielded exceptional results for the latest YSoft SafeQ solution.

"Unmanaged printing costs can cost a business between three and five percent of its revenue," he says. "The roll-out of an intelligent printing solution, like YSoft SafeQ, allows businesses to monitor and account for individual usage of the company's multifunctional printers (MFPs), something that saves on costs and time, whilst changing employees' bad printing habits."

With YSoft SafeQ, a company can define fixed rules to specific employees within the organisation. How and what an employee can print is classified by their role; for example, those with accounting roles may only be allowed to print in black-and-white, whilst those in the marketing department may be allowed to print in colour.

"This, in turn, helps enforce responsible behaviour and leads to lower costs and fewer wasted resources," adds Vachiat.

With the YSoft SafeQ print solution, employees can print and scan faster and more easily, saving them time that they can spend on other tasks. The built-in features, such as mobile print, print roaming and private cloud, give users total independence.

"The new version of the YSoft SafeQ print management solution, YSoft SafeQ 5, includes several completely new features and numerous improvements to existing features, while still maintaining a low total cost of ownership (TCO)," Vachiat explains.

From a single web interface, administrators are able to monitor, change settings and create reports of an organisation's device usage, including that of subsidiaries.