ERP Printing in the Cloud Era: What You Need to Know

According to a recent study conducted by Forbes, roughly 60 to 70% of all software, services and technology in general will be totally cloud-based by as soon as 2020. The cloud has touched nearly every industry that you can think of, but it has been a particular benefit to those organizations in manufacturing and supply chain management in a variety of ways, specifically ERP printing.

Technology has always been a way to take the separate elements that make up a supply chain and combine them into something more powerful, meaningful and organic than any one piece could ever be on its own – the cloud just takes this concept one step further. However, one of the major issues that a lot of manufacturing and supply chain enterprise businesses in particular are running into as we push farther into the cloud era has to do with expansion… just not necessarily in the way you might think.

The Problem With Printing

Let’s say you’re in your office (the “head office”, if you will) and are currently using ERP software to create shipping labels within your current system. Once they’re finished, they then need to be sent to a printer and released at a remote third-party location elsewhere within your supply chain. The issue, however, is that this location doesn’t actually have its own dedicated secure connection back to the manufacturer. This presents a number of clear problems almost immediately:

You’re likely going to have a hard time just authenticating yourself on the network, as most older printer management solutions were never built with cloud-based user authentication in mind.
You’re instantly cut off from features that would be legitimately helpful to you like remote printing, mobile printing, pull printing and more.
You start to research your options and find out that in order to deploy a solution on premise first and then move it into the cloud environment, you need to make some pretty significant changes to the software – or worse, your on premise infrastructure itself.
Because you’re insistent on trying to find a way to “make your legacy solution” work, you’re suddenly limited in terms of which cloud platforms you can work with due to on premise dependencies.
You spend a lot of money in order to fix this problem and you STILL have to deal with a number of inefficiencies introduced by the process. Sure, you can now print remotely – but you have to go through a VPN in order to do so.
Or, you can print out actual hard copies in the head office and physically ship them out to that remote location. But when you consider the amount of additional time this adds (to say nothing of the increased expense), you’re suddenly at a deficit in those areas as well.

All this simply because you needed to be able to print remotely to some disparate part of your supply chain. Suddenly, the benefits of living in the cloud era don’t look like benefits any longer.

PrinterOn: The ERP Printing Solution You Need

These are, in part, the ERP printing issues that services like PrinterOn were designed to help you avoid. If you’re going to make the most of the cloud-based era that we’re now living in, you need to go “all in” as soon as you can. This really is one of those situations where “half measures” will do a lot more harm than good, even though they’re supposedly being made in the name of caution.

For starters, PrinterOn Enterprise is built from the top down to support not only on-premise deployment but also fully cloud environments, third-party cloud services like AWS and more. All of your incompatibility issues are gone in an instant.

Likewise, you also get to enjoy benefits like secure print and release while making excellent use of apps for mobile printing that natively support all of today’s most popular platforms like iOS and Android. You get email printing, native mobile printing, remote printing and more – all without needing to worry about long-term problems like compatibility, flexibility and scalability.

You can now interact with your supply chain in any way that you need at any time that you need, all without worrying about how difficult it is going to be to print that document in the field. PrinterOn isn’t just the best way to guarantee these types of gains – it’s often the ONLY way to do so in the secure way you need when you need it the most.

Leveraging the Power of the Cloud Era to Your Advantage

The cloud era certainly isn’t going anywhere any time soon – not that we would want it to in the first place. The ability to do more out of the office, make excellent use of our time in the field and collaborate anywhere at any time are all massively beneficial to manufacturing and supply chain enterprise businesses in particular.

However, all of this does require you to start thinking about a lot of the critical functions of running a business that far too many people take for granted – with ERP printing being right at the top of that list.

Thanks to the continued advancement of technology, our businesses have evolved in ways that we wouldn’t have thought possible even a few short years ago. Make no mistake: it’s officially time for your ERP printing capabilities to do the same.