FACTFILE: What’s the best MPS model?
There are as many ways to resell managed print services as there are resellers. One of the advantages of a managed solution is there’s greater opportunity for specialisation and differentiation.
Oki marketing manager Antonio Leone says customers are drawn to managed print that provides a monthly flat rate, like a mobile phone plan.
“It also allows them to take on a higher-end printer because they don’t have to outlay a large amount of money up front,” Leone says.
Traditional managed print services where devices are supplied and maintained will continue, although the consensus view is this is a game of scale subject to intense competition and customer scrutiny of page costs.
On the upside, there is the opening to use managed print services as an entrée to a consultative, high-value role as advisor to the organisation. This lifts the reseller from the purchasing department to the C-suite, says industry watcher and former Ricoh Australia executive David Hampe (pictured).
But where the biggest opportunities lie are in providing systems and services tied to the customer’s bottom line. This includes straight-through accounts processing – scanning paper invoices and snatching electronic documents from emails to be matched intelligently and automatically against purchase orders in the customer’s financials system.
This can lead to much wider discussions about workflows, accounting packages, storage and networking. That opens possibilities to sell a wider range of services and products including mobility and security solutions off the back of a humble managed print contract.
“Selling a copier is not transformational but automating your processes can be transformational and make huge impact on our customers,” says Brad Thomas, Canon’s assistant general manager of indirect sales.
Thomas says Canon has invested in business process automation software that has state-of-the-art optical character recognition and compression engines to bolster its commoditised copying business.
He says the software also enables partners to engage customers with devices from other vendors. Canon is recruiting partners outside copier and print channels, especially those with big data, document and information management and financial software experience to work with its print solutions.
“We’re building a new arm of our channel simply around software. We’re recruiting partners who can consult and deploy our solutions particularly with a focus on mid-market.”
Andrew Hill, executive director of BBC Digital, says his Queensland-based Canon partner that employs 150 with offices along the east coast, is “practicing what it preaches” by automating its accounts payable.
“It’s not about trying to sell more to the same customer; it’s more looking at that device that sits in people’s offices is really a hub now.”
CASE STUDY: Financial services on printing fast
Financial institutions have a well-deserved reputation as high-volume print users. There are solid governance and legal reasons for having printouts as well as the large numbers of contracts and other forms that need to be signed, shared and stored and for which the printed page is ideal.
But for Australia’s number two bank, the burden of managing vendors, document security and service levels became too much. Westpac called in IBM and Ricoh to smooth its document workflow and printing at more than 900 locations across Australia.
The partners estimate the bespoke solution saves Westpac 5,000 reams a year or 13 tonnes of unwanted paper – equal to
221 trees.
Importantly for the bank, which trades heavily on its green credentials, is how Ricoh helps Westpac manage its carbon footprint thanks to printers that switch themselves off when not in use. Ricoh’s bespoke Green Reporting solution provides the bank with environmental statistics for its triple-bottom-line reporting while Equitrac software also tracks user costs against Westpac’s LDAP directory.
Users now output fewer pages and access them at the right time and place, by using Ricoh’s Follow You technology, where a user enters a code on a device to start it printing. Unwanted print jobs are deleted from the system without wasting paper.
Aussie Home Loans is another financial services company that looked to its printing devices to improve its workflows. Mark Josman, CEO of managed services provider Speedscan, says Aussie scans 250,000 to 300,000 pages a month from 800 mortgage brokers around Australia. He estimates Aussie has 9 million documents in the Speedscan-hosted repository.
A broker scans documents on its multi-function printer into Speedscan’s database through the bespoke Speedview portal that also captures compliance metadata on the way.
“The upload portal gave them greater security, less use of email bandwidth and greater certainty of delivery of documents and better classification of documents through metadata tagging,” Josman says.
Speedscan was also recently involved in the reconstruction of New Zealand’s quake-prone city of Christchurch where it delivered a digitised property file solution for Christchurch Council to support the rebuilding process.
“We also rolled in to capture earthquake damage information and deliver that to the Earthquake Commission,” Josman says.
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