Print management is a golden opportunity for adding value in

an increasingly competitive market.

Print Management Defined

You can’t sell print management if you can’t define it, and that’s an issue throughout the industry as dealers and manufacturers struggle to pinpoint exactly what print management means.

Print management is an end-to-end solution that takes into consideration all of a customer’s imaging and output devices to come up with the most cost-effective environment,” explains Tom Callinan, president of Strategy Development, a management consulting and advanced sales training firm. But for the office equipment dealer, print management is more than that. “It’s a highly profitable defensive and offensive position,” adds Callinan who is also a former copier dealer and facilitator of a print management workshop offered by BTA. His top print management clients are making total gross margins—equipment and aftermarket—of 55-57 percent. That’s not too shabby considering the margin model for a copier dealer is 45 percent with most copier dealers in the 35-40 percent range.

Callinan isn’t alone in encouraging dealers to protect themselves with a print management strategy. “If you’re not in it, get in it,” recommends Frank Cannata of Marketing Research Consultants. “It’s a tool to help you manage [your customer] and helps you retain your customer, plus it opens the door to sell other devices.” 

“Print management provides account ownership,” adds Brian Bisset, publisher of The MFP Report.

Office equipment manufacturers are also hyping print management and offering their own home-grown print management solutions although some are more committed than others.

Bob Sostilio, president of the market research firm, Sostilio & Associates, cites Xerox as an example of a manufacturer that is leveraging print management. “Xerox knows more about their installed base than any other manufacturer out there,” says Sostilio. “It’s not new; they’ve been doing it for 10 years. You want to know where every click is made and how much toner is being consumed. Don’t wait for a manufacturer to install it on your machine, go out and find a third party who does it. It will pay for itself.”

Not only are the major office equipment manufacturers on the print management bandwagon, so are secondary suppliers like Muratec. “Control the output, control the customer,” noted Muratec Vice President of Marketing and Sales Jim D’Emidio at the company’s recent dealer meeting. “As a dealer, you need to get on the print management offense because someone will eventually try to manage all the print output from your customers.”

Options Abound

There’s a wealth of print management solutions on the market with the leading third-party names encompassing FMAudit, Print Audit, Print Fleet, MWAi. Add to that a handful of smaller providers as well as home-grown solutions like Ricoh’s @Remote, HP’s WebJet Admin, and Toshiba’s Encompass. And the list goes on.

With so many choices, one would think the market must be saturated. “When you combine the OEMs with the independents, I believe we’re all just scratching the surface,” contends Rich Piper, president of FMAudit. “All combined, maybe we’re engaging two percent of the salespeople on an assessment level and maybe less than that—one percent from an automated metering perspective.”

Likewise, Callinan estimates 30-40 percent of dealers are talking about print management, but less than 5 percent are taking advantage of it.

As far as the current crop of print management products, Callinan is hesitant to name names, but believes all of the products on the market are good. However, for dealers who just want to get their feet wet, he recommends HP’s WebJet Admin. “It’s vendor neutral and a free download that does a lot of things this other software does. You don’t need to be an HP dealer. You don’t even need an HP device. It picks up Canon’s, Ricoh’s, everything. Yet they aren’t out there running seminars, so nobody knows about it.”

Third-party print management providers and some manufacturers may not agree with Callinan’s assessment, especially since vendors like FMAudit are helping dealers take the print management plunge via a simple tool—a USB key for collecting output data.

“Our key is designed for rapid print assessment—get in, get the data, get out,” says Piper. “You then use that data strategically to move your sales guys forward.”

FMAudit’s technology provides users with volume reports, cost-per-copy reports, usage vs. duty cycle reports, and a monthly matrix report that identifies toner coverage for managed devices. Another report compares the average monthly volume of each device and compares it to the manufacturer’s monthly duty cycles and then provides the dealer with a graphic representation of over- and under-utilized assets. “This report is very quick and puts this information in the hands of salespeople who can target devices for replacement,” says Piper.

Piper reports that dealers are seeing a return on investment within 15 days, and it’s not unusual for some early adopters to double up on the amount of keys within three to four months.

FMAudit isn’t limiting itself to its Viewer USB key. The company is migrating towards an onsite model via FMAudit Onsite, a program that is loaded on a workstation at the customer’s location. Now it’s no longer necessary for the dealer to show up and plug a key in and out of a device. “It’s a fully automated process of what it collects, when, where, and what format,” explains Piper. The company also offers WebAudit, a browser-based data-collection program that collects data via the Internet.

Home-grown solutions such as Ricoh’s @Remote provide dealers with a solution targeted specifically to a specific brand. Interest is increasing. “Our experience has been quite good and we have a significant percentage of dealers who have signed up to market @Remote, says John Carolomano, Ricoh’s senior marketing manager. Most of those, he says, are larger, more proactive dealers.

From a print management perspective, @Remote offers more than just meter readings. It also offers service alerts and provides the dealer and his customer’s IT personal with a fleet management portal that tracks all the devices at a customer site. “You don’t get fleet reporting with third-party meter reading solutions,” notes Carlomano.

@Remote provides what Carlomano calls, “true device management,” automating the service reporting process to where a device can notify the dealer when it needs service so that the dealership is in a position to call the customer and notify them that service is necessary. “It gives the dealership the ability to offer an advanced level of service,” says Carlomano. It also allows dealers to upgrade firmware from a PC with just a few clicks in the devices that @Remote is monitoring. In addition, it automates the toner alert process, which is useful for customers under CPC programs because it enhances supplies ordering. “Device management changes the way a dealership does business,” says Carlomano. “From the way service alerts are processed, to the way dispatch is processed, to the way meters are collected and billed.”

Words of Caution

“Even though they know it’s a market space, most dealers haven’t figured out how to implement a strategy correctly,” says Callinan. “Usually by the time they call me in, they’re floundering. It’s not because they’re making catastrophic mistakes, but they’re 10 percent off in every area. They’re 10 percent off in their sales coverage model, 10 percent off in the types of companies they’re calling on, 10 percent off in how they price their deals, and you run all those 10 percents together and they’re not getting any sales.”

Callinan was a dealer himself so he knows the drill. He recalls the story of a successful copier company that asked one of their more competent sales reps to focus on print management. During the course of a year, that sales rep gave 63 print management proposals without one sale.  

 “One of the bigger mistakes dealers make is that they try to sell print management the way they sell copiers,” says Callinan. “They’re trying to sell a lot of equipment up front and I think they’re missing a lot of opportunities.”

He also cautions against expecting instant gratification. “What print management doesn’t do is evolve a customer from four employees per asset to 10 employees per asset overnight. I’m not even sure if 10 employees per asset is the right number,” says Callinan. “I see very few environments that are actually at that type of efficiency. It’s more or less getting the right asset into the right output environment. Where I really see the ability to consolidate assets is where they have scanners, fax, and printers all right next to one another and you can clearly put an MFP in that area, so you take them from three devices to one.”

Is print management too complicated for the average office equipment dealer? “I think they have the impression that you can’t make money with printers,” opines Callinan. “I can debate that, but you don’t ever have to sell a printer to be in print management because of the aftermarket. That said, if you sold copiers the way printers are currently sold, and you put a price on your website, you’d be in the low single digits as well. But you don’t— you wrap them into a lease, you wrap them into a CPP agreement, and people don’t know what they’re spending and next thing you know, you’re making 35 percent off of your copier. Do the same thing with the printer—wrap it into a lease on a CPP agreement. Don’t tell them the cost is $599. Say, ‘We’ll cover your 100,000 prints a month and we’ll give you these five new printers and it’s .017 cents a page.’ They don’t have to know what they’re paying for the printer.”

The customer is another obstacle to success. “You’ll go into a customer and they’re spending $2,700 a month on their imaging and print fleet, but it’s completely under the radar screen—a $50 invoice here, a $125 invoice there,” explains Callinan. “Then you go in and do all this work and save them a little money—five percent or whatever, and you come in at $2,500 a month with a single invoice from one vendor. Now they start getting an invoice for $2,500 a month and all of a sudden it’s an irritant.” 

This is why Callinan says a print management sale differs from the traditional copier sale. “It’s not a copier sale where you sell and come back three years later,” he says. “You must have quarterly reviews with the customer and stay engaged with them.”

Print Management FAQs

Callinan hears the same questions about print management over and over in his workshops and consulting practice. How do we price the deal? How do we compensate our reps? How do we keep our copier reps from viewing the print specialist as competition? What market space do we go after? Should we use specialists or let our copier reps sell it? Can you make money in this industry?

Is there a one-size-fits-all type of answer for all the questions dealers ask? “Never,” says Callinan. “There’s always six different ways to do something. I’m a big advocate on the compensation side of compensating on the aftermarket, so making the primary variable portion of the reps compensation based on the aftermarket rather than the equipment. The more aftermarket a company gets, the healthier it is. And in the long run, the more aftermarket it controls, the more equipment it’s going to get. Can you put together a program that primarily comps on the equipment and be successful? Sure, copier dealers have been doing that for a long time. But I don’t think that aligns the rep with the company’s goals.”

Making it Work

In many respects, print management is a concept that’s still running ahead of the curve.

Piper concedes it’s been a challenge reaching the notoriously frugal dealer audience. “I don’t get how we can sit in front of a dealer principle or some other level of executive and salesperson and within five or ten minutes of telling them what this thing does, they all shake their head and agree. But when it comes time to execute a program, they just don’t do it. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why.”

He believes part of the problem is complacency. “Some of it is that rapid assessment with USB keys is a very small part of what they do,” he adds. “I don’t really understand exactly why, but I would say this, the fax machine was never branded because of the slow adoption. And maybe that’s what this is like. I do think it’s a matter of time. Do I believe we’re going to get a 100 percent penetration? No, but I think the awareness will accelerate at a much more exponential rate.”

What’s it going to take to get things rolling? “The short answer is competition,” says Piper. “If I’m a sales rep and I go to an account, I’m going to be very surprised if someone using the FM Audit technology was in there and it just knocked out my equipment and I had no idea. That’s what it’s going to take, a punch in the face, a slap in the face, whatever you want to call it, it’s going to hit home. And they’re going to say, ‘I’ve got to get into it now.’”

“It’s just a matter of time,” adds Ricoh’s Carlomano. The key he says is getting the  various disciplines within a dealership to acknowledge the opportunity. Recognizing this, Ricoh was careful to ensure that launch materials included content not only for the dealer principle, but for the head of service, the head of aftermarket and operations, and sales personnel. “If we can make any one of those groups aware of the value that @Remote has to improve their business, it can dramatically help them improve their bottom line. It’s just a matter of making the various business owners aware of what it can do for them.” u

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Third-Party Print Management Providers at a Glance

FMAudit

www.fmaudit.com

In addition to FMAudit reviewed in the article, the following companies also offer print management solutions:

MWA Intelligence

www.mwaintelligence.com

Key Print Management Products:

Intelligent Assets pre-sales Meter Audit tools allow dealers to show prospects how to best leverage the dealer’s recommended mix of devices. According to the company’s website, “This cost justification can shorten sales cycles and pave the way for deeper customer relationships.” 

Intelligent Device Management is a solution that provides the dealer with device error codes and diagnostic information to expedite customer service.

Intelligent Service Management is a module that automates and enhances processes for service dispatch, help desks, part replenishment, credit collections, and meter billing.

Intelligent Workforce is a module that links the service activities of a dealer’s field force and other key areas of the organization, connecting them with service management, supply chain operations, dispatchers, account management, credit and collections, and IT.

PrintFleet

www.printfleet.com

Key Print Management Products:

PrintFleet Suite is a USB key that plugs into a networked computer to gather information on an organization’s printing devices. It can perform print audits, collect meter reads, check supply levels, and troubleshoot devices without installing any software.

PrintFleet Suite-Pro is also a USB key that combines the core features of PrintFleet Suite with SmartScan discovery and data collection, intelligent network recognition and file mapping, advanced error code collection, and data sorting from the user interface. It is designed for use by sales reps and service techs who need to perform rapid assessments on client sites with 50 to 5,000 printing devices.

PrintFleet Optimizer Plus (PFOPlus) is a hosted remote print management solution designed to continuously monitor printers, copiers, fax machines, and MFPs on a network. Key capabilities include remote meter read collection, remote device diagnostics and the proactive maintenance and supplies fulfillment. It supports devices from all leading vendors and allows dealers to access client information any time of the day.

PrintFleet Suite is a suite of four print management and assessment tools, including PrintFleet Audit, PrintFleet Asset Tracker, PrintFleet Remote Resetter, and PrintFleet IP Analyzer. 

Print Audit

www.printaudit.com

Key Print Management Products:

Print Audit Assessor is a tool that allows dealers to perform a full assessment of their customer’s print environment. This data can be used to analyze volumes and create specific proposals related to a customer’s needs.

Print Audit Rapid Assessment Key V2 is a USB key that gathers meter reads, discovers devices, and troubleshoots document output issues. It works with virtually every output device on the market.

Print Audit Facilities Manager is a tool for remotely collecting meter reads, automating supplies fulfillment, and reporting service information for managing fleets of printers, copiers, fax machines, and MFPs.