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26 Print.IT Reseller
Managed Print Services
Anyone attending Photizo’s 2013
Transform Europe MPS conference
in London on October 14-16 would
have been left in no doubt that the
print market is changing and that
resellers must change, too, or else
face a slow and lingering death.
The opening address by inspirational
speaker Jim Lawless set the tone with
his exhortation to ‘Tame the Tigers’ – the
fear, doubt and indecision that assail us
whenever opportunity presents itself –
and to be brave in the deadlines we give
ourselves. Once you have decided on a
course of action, he seemed to be saying,
act quickly.
This was very much a reseller event.
However, there was representation from
the end user community. Jonas Hjerpe,
head of technology procurement at the
WPP Group, and Paul Vincent, formerly a
Global Procurement Director for BT Group
and now a consultant, both contributed to
a roundtable discussion with interesting
insights into the end user mindset.
When asked what was the one thing
they would change about managed
print services (MPS), both highlighted
questionable contracts. Hjerpe called
for 'contracts that made sense' and an
alternative to the click model favoured by
MPS providers so that one only paid for the
toner one used. Vincent implored resellers
only to charge for real services: “How often
do you charge for fresh air?” he asked.
Resellers were accused of under-
estimating the importance of print to
businesses – “Print is vital to our pitches,”
explained Jonas, “it is much more than an
MFP in the corner” – and of failing to take
proper consideration of end users’ needs.
Poor implementations of FollowMe printing
and ‘clunky’ MFP user interfaces were cited
as examples.
Vincent also warned resellers not to
take their customers for granted. “You can
only win a contract once and then you
Must do better
Resellers are warned that they are not reacting fast enough to changing
market demands and are failing to meet the needs of customers.
James Goulding reports
“How often
do you
charge for
fresh air?”
can lose it. If you are not using the time
to cement a relationship you will lose that
opportunity. In MPS, there is a tendency
to do a lot in the first 18 months and then
become complacent,” he said.
When asked what he valued as a
customer, Hjerpe said: “I’d rather [resellers]
came up with a proper service design. MPS
is only as good as it's managed. Building in
service management is essential to ensure
MPS is still effective 10, 12, 18 months
down the line.”
On the broader issue of MPS benefits,
Ken Stewart, Photizo vice president of
Publications and Services, highlighted
one of the major themes of the three-
day event: the failure of resellers to take
MPS to the next level. He said: “We have
surveyed thousands of end users over
the last five years. One of the interesting
questions we ask is ‘what benefits do you
receive from your MPS engagements?’. We
see value benefits of cost reduction and
consolidated fleets, but what is often left
on the table is benefits of BPO (business
process optimisation). That is a great green
field of opportunity that the channel still
has to exploit.”
Vincent advised resellers to “see
the contract as the start not the end”.
He added: “People are always going
to want to do more in a contract. In
this space, a five-year contract means a
five-year contract and resellers say ‘We
will talk about something else at the
end of 5 years’. That doesn’t show much
dynamism.”
That said, there was some debate as
to whether a business would choose to go
to an MPS provider for advice on how to
change its processes. Speaking as an end
user, Hjerpe said that he was over-run with
consultants and liked to keep things simple
– and separate. MPS and the mechanics
of MPS (e.g. the best devices and cheaper,
better services) were one thing and
Business Process Change or re-engineering
a document process was another.
“It’s too easy to overlook the basics
and do them very, very well. You have a
nice clean fleet and six months down the
line it's a mess again because it has not
been managed properly. And that’s not
very complicated. MDS is a change. Get
basic change management right and don’t
get confused about BPO stuff,” he said.
He also advised MPS providers to be
more sophisticated in contracts, which
he describes as ‘a positive governance
tool for a relationship’, adding that “a
surprisingly high number of people offer to
pay penalties if SLAs are missed but very
few ask for a bonus if they make bigger
than promised savings”, a demand that he
considered perfectly reasonable.
Get more from your data
One of the underlying themes of this year’s
event was the failure of MPS providers to
satisfy customer expectations. Often, this is
down to poor account management and a
tendency to let things drift in the later stages
of a contract.
In this context, Newfield IT’s CompleteView is an
interesting product that enables users to make better
use of all the data they have collected and present
information in an engaging way that can be quickly
and easily understood by customers.
Its key feature is an interactive dashboard with
colour-coded (red, amber and green) dials that let
resellers and their customers see at a glance what
aspects of a fleet are working well and what are not.
Ratings for cost per page and performance are based
on comparisons with two million assessed assets that
have been imported into CompleteView.
Users can drill down into the data in more detail,
re-purposing it by site or technology. For example,
you could compare printer costs to MFP costs or
compare costs for an optimised site versus a non-
optimised one. You can also compare the cost and
utilisation of different devices.
What If scenarios let you see the benefits of an
action, for example what would happen to costs if
you moved volume from printers to MFPs or reduced
the number of colour pages. The next version will
include more scenarios so that you can assess the
environmental impact of reducing print or the impact
of printing more pages in duplex.
www.newfieldit.com
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