Jason Ganis, co-founder and managing director of Smart Print Fleet Management, says that bad printing practices and bad worker habits are rife in the SMB market in Australia.
He notes, for instance, the tendency for staff to go ahead and order new printers without consulting management or the IT department.
“It’s not unusual for companies to suddenly find they have hundreds of ink jet printers,” Ganis says. And usually this sort of carelessness spills over into alarming page costs.
“Smart Print has uncovered this following internal audits, sometimes finding machines costing 12 cents a page instead of 1. “We’ve even found ink jet printers costing around 25c per page.”
Managed print rises on down economy
Undoubtedly one of the key drivers for the MPS market was the global financial crisis (GFC).
“What the GFC did was put cost saving on the agenda and MPS was one of the few ways you could deliver savings immediately,” Bailey says.
But the question being asked in certain quarters is now that the worst of the financial crisis is behind us, will demand for MPS continue to grow or will companies start slipping back into complacency?
“But we are going beyond just cost,” Bailey says. “Now there is much more discussion about environmental impacts such as reducing energy and general sustainability.”
While cost will always be an important factor guiding decisions about MPS, the market is definitely moving away from a transaction- based approach to a service and solutions model, which in turn is presenting opportunities for resellers to develop more tailored offerings, in turn generating more attractive annuity streams.
“Over the next five years suppliers will simply just ask, ‘How many pages do you want?’ And that is what they will deliver,” says Michael Rebiffe, sales and marketing manager with established printer distie Distribution One.
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