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Managed Print Services – The Dealer Advantage
Only 10% of the $1.8 billion in document management services is billed by dealers, whereas 90% is provided by other document and print service providers who have long history with the corporation. These service providers have primarily focussed on providing consulting services for enterprise content management or production printing. These areas include: document strategy development, content delivery, document workflow, archiving, document delivery, forms, managed services, production printing, and transactional document outsourcing.
What’s hot? Gartner surveys show that many organizations are currently researching the costs of office print, copy, or fax functions or conducting needs assessments to adopting or renewing a managed print services approach to meet its office print, fax, and scanning needs. In addition, most of these organizations believe they are playing catch-up to react appropriately to trends in office printing such as the role of color printers, multifunctional products (MFPs), and managed print services.
With these changing times, the advantage these service providers have is the relationships they have developed with corporate management and key stakeholders. They often understand the business drivers of the corporations and can translate them into lucrative consulting contracts in document management and document strategy implementation. But they do not have the in depth knowledge of devices and printer fleets that the dealers have!
The Dealer Advantage: So how can the Dealer increase revenue through the managed print services trend? The Dealer advantage is their service and supply organization. Every day, Dealers are involved in break/fix delivery, device maintenance, and supply delivery, and have developed relationships through this support channel. Dealers also have a strategic advantage in their knowledge of the available devices. But this knowledge must be moved out of the commodity realm of ppm, meters & duty, and into understanding how a printer fleet can address a corporation’s printing needs. Print service providers focus on content and information. The Dealer has the expertise of understanding the output devices and should be able to transition into the hot area of managing print services. The challenge is to move from supplying and supporting commodities to managing corporate printer fleets. To make this transition, the Dealer requires a tool which gathers knowledge of the client’s fleet and identify where printing dollars can be saved using managed services. PrinterRx is such a management tool which would give the Dealer this strategic advantage with an in depth knowledge of what is going on at the client’s fleet.
Best practices in optimizing corporate printing follow four steps to better manage the corporate spending in printing: Analysis & Strategy, Deployment, Optimization, and Sustainment. Optimizing corporate printing does not end with Sustainment, but follows a continuous process. Best practices also recognize that the Printer fleet is a corporate asset, and thus, should be managed as any other IT asset.
Analysis & Strategy
Assessment is one of the hottest areas that corporations are considering. Most companies do an assessment every 5 or 6 years. Before any print strategy can be developed, a baseline should be established. During baseline assessment, all costs are incorporated into the picture – not just consumables - the biggest cost being human resources. If the Dealers already have a database of device inventory, activity and events, their revenues can be increased by offering these assessment services. Best practices conclude that this assessment and strategy development phase should be hardware vendor independent.
The baseline assessment is used as the kick-off point for developing a corporate print strategy.
Deployment
After assessment and strategy development, corporations implement their print strategy. Deployment is a critical phase where the Dealer gets or retains the managed services contract. The Dealer can put competitive managed print services proposals together based upon the inventory and understanding of their client’s printing history – this database developed through monitoring devices. A greater knowledge than both your client or competitor is a significant strategic advantage.
Optimization
Once the fleet strategy is deployed, the corporation optimizes their managed print services through pro-active monitoring of printer assets, contracts, supplies management, and service level agreements. Developing a device retirement strategy for your customer with an understanding of their business needs, may ensure that you retain or increase your contract and manage the new devices. As with every aspect of managed print services, a tool which collects and stores this device and printing data is necessary to support the intelligent recommendations you provide your customer.
Sustainment
The key to sustaining the savings reaped from managing printing is measure, adjust, measure adjust on a continuous and ongoing basis. This is where Dealers can retain and increase business by proactively demonstrating their value with regular report cards on their customer’s printing – including trend graphs showing pages, costs, and problems. This report card should provide areas where improvements can be made such as removing, swapping, or replacing – always with an eye to managing more of the corporation’s devices in combination with reducing total printing costs. Of course, a tool, such as PrinterRx, is required to continuously monitor the corporate print environment and generate the data for such a report card.
The direction of managed print services is to reduce – to reduce total costs, to reduce the amount of printing, to reduce the number of devices, to reduce the number of manufacturers and models, and to reduce the number of vendors. If you are the only vendor providing this regular report card on printing, you have an advantage to increase the number of devices you manage and to offer additional consulting services in other areas of managed print services.
If you know more than your customer about his printer fleet and can provide him cost savings recommendations, you are on your way towards reaping additional revenue with this knowledge you possess.
Author Biography:
Darlene Sheldon is Director of Business Development with 366 Software, developer of PrinterRx MSP software for managed print services. 366 Software principals have been a member of the Printer Work Group (PWG), the group that establishes IEEE standards for printing devices, for over 10 years.
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