It’s impossible to determine whether the management of your thermal printers is adapted to your company without first having defined your printing needs in terms of volume, quality, performance, etc. The more substantial and complex your needs are, the more serious the amount in issue from halts in production or printing errors will be.
Thermal printers are a class of their own. They have technical characteristics that differ from those of traditional printers such as temperature settings, blackening rate, printing speed, barcode symbology and other features that are specific to printers, mobile or not, and are mainly used for RFID and barcodes.
Applications for the management of traditional systems generally don’t offer these features. However, the optimisation of your thermal printers depends directly on the value that it will have in the context of your operations and not on the above-mentioned features. Don’t forget that thermal printers require special maintenance.
Advantages of good thermal printer management
- Reduction in total operating costs
- Increase in operable time
- Uniformity of printer parameters and microprograms
- Reduction in employee travel time (remote handling)
Why always depend on your employees to contact the information technology department each time there is a problem with a printer? There are features that allow for two-way communication between system administrators and printers: features that make it possible for commands to be sent to printers and for data to be retrieved from network servers.
Grouping and remote management, two major features
The printing technology expert, Zebra Technologies, addressed printer management in one of its white papers which inspired me to write this blog post. Zebra suggests solutions that involve the grouping together of printers which allows for remote management.
The software program ZebraNet™ Bridge Enterprise facilitates printer management anywhere in the world, as long as they are Zebra printers connected to a server. The grouping of printers, modifications and installations to fonts done remotely as well as surveillance in real-time of the machine status are only some of the many useful features of this program.
If label printing is a crucial step to business as usual, it is also important to pay particular attention to the way you manage your printers. What could start as an innocent problem with material could quickly become a large problem for your company. Lastly, we suggest prolonging the lifespan of your printers by choosing a preventive maintenance service.
