As communications continue migrating away ink on paper and toward screens, a new breed of intelligent printing devices is finding its place on resellers’ portfolios.
Beyond spitting out inkjet or laser-printed pages, these devices increasingly capture and onboard it into document workflows. Today it’s about smart multifunction printers (MFPs) crammed with features such as data security and connectivity to third party software – including SaaS – as well as inline finishing and environmental safeguards.
Vendors are bringing out some exciting new kit. Take Oki Data, for example. Antonio Leone, marketing manager of Oki Data Australia, says the vendor is broadening the range of products that support its Smart Extendable Platform (SXP).
“Oki products with SXP allow users to streamline and integrate their MFP into their environments. This ensures that document workflows – capture, distribution, management and output – are all performed in a manner that drives efficiencies,” says Leone.
“These products also offer advanced levels of security, including secure print job encryption, to preserve the confidentiality of data and information. Collectively, these solutions enable Oki channel partners to access customers in medium-to-large organisations, where security, device integration and efficiency optimisation are critical, with heavy workloads,” he says.
“That ensures favourable consumables returns, as well as the opportunity to deploy such products on managed print service contracts.”
Billing and connectivity
Kyocera has its new A4 MFP range of four 40ppm and two 60ppm devices. All of these are fitted with Kyocera’s environmentally friendly Ecosys technology. The ‘toner only’ drum-free system delivers up to 500,000 pages per drum on the high-end models, which dramatically lowers the waste generated during the life of the product, says Supol Leng, Kyocera’s Ecosys product manager.
But Kyocera is offering more than the boxes, as it markets its cost-saving Three-Tier Colour Coverage Billing solution, with colour print costs based on actual usage of colour toner per page. This allows customers to simply pay for what they use.
Mark Vella, director of sales & marketing, Kyocera Document Solutions A/NZ, says: “Three-tier billing is especially beneficial to customers with low-colour coverage levels who are generally charged full-colour rates. It’s important to consider the print needs of both SMEs and large enterprises, as SMEs are generally looking to cut the costs of printing, while large enterprises are looking to manage their colour printing volumes.”
KYOeasyprint is a productivity tool for SMEs, offering single-click generation of complex printing routines. It enables one document to be sent to different internal departments in a single procedure, speeding administrative processes, increasing office efficiency and reducing administrative costs.
Meanwhile, Kyocera’s SharePoint Connector allows users to browse through SharePoint document libraries and sites, from most HyPAS-enabled Kyocera MFPs, and enables printing from and scanning to Microsoft SharePoint, including SharePoint Online.
Next: Vendor partnerships
For Fuji Xerox Printers, teaching resellers how to maintain and expand their relationships with end customers is as valuable as the hardware itself. FXP is now offering an enhanced platform that lets partners capitalise on this managed print opportunity, particularly in the mid-market segment. Xerox Partner Print Services (XPPS) can help selected partners compete more effectively, move to lasting contractual agreements with customers, build revenue and enhance the value of their businesses.
Implementing XPPS requires significant changes to business and sales processes and partners must achieve technical, sales and delivery certification. FXP works with selected partners to develop a business plan and staff training.
Resellers can develop more efficient strategies for their customers by assessing their print output, gauging opportunities for improvement and designing and implementing new print strategies and workflows. With XPPS, resellers can also manage a total multi-brand service solution. David Borg, general manager of FXP Australia & New Zealand, describes this as “more than a cost per click program… with XPPS, Fuji Xerox Printers can offer partners a complete support and service function for their end customer.”
And earlier this year, FXP rolled out its refreshed partner program, PremierOne. Borg says: “The cornerstone of the program is customisation and collaboration. We will work with each of our partners to identify mutually agreed annual targets and develop tailored sales and marketing programs for meeting these.”
Harnessing info
We are also seeing the appearance of software solutions that help end customers process and store torrents of data flowing through their businesses, such as Lexmark’s Perceptive Software division, which has released five new products.
Arjan Paulssen, general manager of Lexmark A/NZ, describes Lexmark Solution Composer as a graphic design tool that simplifies creation of custom workflow solutions in a fraction of the time. It does so without the requirement for programming expertise, resulting in faster processes and reduced manual errors. “Exceptions or discrepancies in information are quickly resolved.”
Intelligent Capture is a comprehensive processing solution combining automated document classification, data extraction, validation, routing and approval. “It takes paper and digital information and sorts content into relevant context, reading critical information in a similar way to the human brain,” adds Paulssen.
Enterprise Search is a search platform that unifies access to all information across the enterprise. “It enables customers to find and view critical information that is typically trapped within an organisation – locked away on network drives, email servers or even on a local PC hard drive.”
My Sign Shop enables retail customers to increase sales with more impactful store signage. It allows resellers to provide a complete signage solution for retail customers from design through to print. “With research showing that three out of four people make their buying decisions after entering the retail store, this cloud-based solution can significantly impact both their customers’ top and bottom lines,” he claims.
HP PageWide
HP is continuously rethinking the way printers can function in the office, says Ben Vivoda, who heads up printing for HP South Pacific. “An important part of this involves listening to the needs of the B2B end customer and responding with technology that reduces costs, maintains print quality and offers mobile printing solutions.”
One of the latest innovations available to distributors and resellers is HP PageWide technology, which has been introduced in the HP Officejet Pro X Series and the HP Officejet Enterprise X Series printers. These devices have revolutionised the way SMB customers and small workteams increase productivity and cut costs, says Vivoda, by delivering quality printing at up to twice the speed at up to half the printing cost compared with colour laser printers.
“HP PageWide technology uses thousands of tiny nozzles on an immobile printhead to simultaneously deliver four colours of original HP pigment ink onto a moving sheet of paper.”
In response to a growing mobile workforce, HP has introduced NFC and wireless direct capabilities to its enterprise products, allowing end users to securely print documents on the go, without compromising data security. To improve workflows and better integrate mobile devices into the office printing environment, HP also released the $99 1200w Mobile Print Accessory, allowing businesses to affordably enable touch-to-print and wireless direct on a range of existing HP devices.
A distributor’s strategy
Dynamic Supplies has come a long way since its humble beginnings in a Brisbane garage 20 years ago. The Australian-owned company has evolved into a print giant, with an annual turnover approaching $300 million, 140 staff, and state-of-the-art distribution facilities in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Auckland.
Managing director Scott McLennan says DS renewed its focus on print solutions almost a decade ago. “In 2005, we decided that we needed to provide our resellers with specific products that would assist them in print solutions. So without taking the focus off what we do at Dynamic Supplies, we established a business called PrintSolv.”
Based in Sydney, PrintSolv has a dedicated sales force offering solutions for print and copier resellers. PrintSolv is the exclusive agency for Evolved Office dealer marketing services in Australia & New Zealand.
Evolved Office provides targeted marketing services and ready-to-go content specifically designed for office equipment dealers through its Evolved Office Marketing portal.
Additionally, PrintSolv and DS recently partnered to launch a program that allows DS and its vendors to promote marketing campaigns to end users via the dealer. The service is provided to the dealer free, and helps hardware vendors communicate their key messaging through the dealer’s contact list, while never actually gaining exposure or access to the contact list.
McLennan says the program was launched in September this year and early results have been successful. “The program has created new hardware business for many dealers but more importantly it has created hardware sales from dealers that traditionally only sold consumables.”
PrintSolv is the exclusive distributor for FMAudit Products in Asia-Pacific. In Australia, around 160 dealers have subscribed and collectively use FMAudit to monitor more than 250,000 devices across 20,000 end-user businesses. FMAudit is a complete suite of solutions providing services such as automated meter readings from managed devices, TCO reporting and supply triggered marketing, such as ‘toner near empty’ alerts via emails to customers, with links to an ordering page.
ROI Print Manager helps businesses manage employees’ print activity under a document management strategy. Customised routing rules automatically modify end user print activity to balance workloads across the enterprise, without disrupting productivity levels.
MPS packages
The benefit in implementing a commercial-grade inkjet solution is “bang for bucks”, reflects Jason Ganis, managing director of SmartPrint Fleet Management, which provides hardware and solutions in managed print services (MPS) bundles.
He says SmartPrint offers both hardware and solutions exclusively in the MPS space, relieving corporate clients’ worries of navigating today’s bewildering spectrum of IT, cloud and hosted solutions.
The reseller represents the full gamut of brands, including HP, Lexmark, Fuji Xerox, Konica Minolta, Canon, Ricoh, Kyocera, Toshiba, Océ, Oki, and Memjet.
So what’s hot? Ganis says that Memjet’s high-speed ‘Waterfall’ printing technology and HP ‘PageWide’ wide-array technology have seen growth due to lean running costs, cheap acquisition and high standards of out-of-the box kit.
“On the environmental front, the devices do not use laser technology, meaning no need for drums and fusers to burn the toner into the page, thus a heap less power consumption, less landfill – and the ink, in most instances, is less carcinogenic,” he says.
Ganis sees an increased requirement for scanning functionality with streamlined workflow solutions and on and off ramps from the clients’ operating system. He adds that “the benefits of a good workflow solution are unmeasurable. We have seen countless cases where we have implemented some software, and programmed one-touch keys at the hardware side and files at the client’s server which have improved processing turnaround times, squashed paperwork delinquency, and removed manual data entry.
“Businesses are usually averse to change and find a way to process documents that works no matter how archaic or impractical it may be,” he says. “Our team can shed some light on alternate ways that will improve day-to-day business in leaps and bounds.”
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