Last week I sent 9 different print jobs to our MyQ print server over 2 days. As I was extremely busy with meetings and such, I did not have time to fetch the documents right away — and as one major benefit of ‘pull-printing’ is the security aspect of documents not sitting around (exposed) on a printer, I waited until I would (of course most efficiently) have time to print them all at once.

When I eventually swiped my ID badge to access the list of print jobs that I’d sent, I saw a total of 9 documents in the queue. I was initially surprised that I would even want to print so many documents in a 2-day period.

A quick review of the pending documents showed that I could actually delete 3 of those 9 jobs before actually printing them, as the documents were no longer needed.

I walked away with my 6 needed documents and then it hit me…

33% reduction in waste — and associated costs.

And that was just my own savings, in only two days. What potential would that have — in terms of ink/toner, paper (trees, forests), maintenance costs, and ultimately higher profits — for departments that print a lot of large documents on a regular basis, like HR, Finance, or Legal teams?

We see a lot of statistics about how much MyQ saves our customers, but I had never really made the conscious connection that it does exactly the same thing for us at our own offices — every single day.

Martin Janus, our CEO, has said about why he and his friends initially built MyQ: “We wanted to build something that would help companies to save time and automate processes, enabling fewer people to do more… to reduce training needs for new people and make it a consistent experience.”

Three ways that MyQ returns money to the PROFIT column

MyQ certainly does that. And I’ve been inspired to have a couple chats with Martin about the concept of laziness often driving innovation. Bill Gates has been quoted saying, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it,” and I recall that Henry Ford and a few others have suggested similar, that a person who does not want to work all day is often the best person to get things done in the most efficient — and innovative — way possible.

“We had one definitive vision — to produce a simple and cost-effective solution,” said Janus in a 2015 interview with Andrew Unsworth of KeypointIntelligence.com.

And the rest is history.

Ahead of its time: Astrologicky Orloj (Astronomical Clock) in Prague

After my own personal positive interaction with MyQ Solution as an automatic saver of time and resources last week, I realized that MyQ is another one of a long list of innovations/discoveries that Czechs can be proud of: Polarography, Contact Lenses, Sugar Cubes, Arc Lamps, Semtex, Screw Propellers, Fingerprints, Blood Types, Lightning Conductors… and of course the original Pilsner-style beer — widely known as the best in its class.


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