BEI Services Inc. Processing 800,204 service calls on 1,743,159 imaging devices from 15,414 service technicians using $57,017,636 in parts adding up to 17,645,083,293 service prints/copies (yes, that's Billion) for the month of July 2010… These are some pretty astonishing figures for a single month, and BEI has been doing this for nearly 17 years. Today BEI Services, Inc. has the largest database in the world when it comes to service data on imaging devices, including information about parts and technicians. With a total of over six million serial numbers in their database and growing, BEI has created more industry benchmarks for machines and technicians than any other company in the world. Dealerships around the world use their data to see where they stand in relation to their peers, and manufacturers use their data to validate machine performance. Wes McArtor - President                          BEI Services is in business to help dealerships maintain their profitability by showing them where service problems are. They process the dealer's service call data and compare it against national benchmarks to see what contrasts there are and why. Their data is very abundant, yet easily accessible to help dealers pin point issues and the reasons for their problems. BEI's Executive CSI dashboard (shown here) allows user access to their performance data with a few clicks of the mouse. BEI Services recently created their "Service Reporting Software" that they allow dealers to use for free without any obligation to purchase other products from BEI Services. This new web based software will allow dealers to manage and organize their service calls, preserve service call histories and maintain parts usage information. It also collects all the data needed for BEI to process, if these dealers elect to use BEI Services' normal products.                                                                                                                                                                                                         Bud Karakey - VP of Operation This software also helps manage technicians' service calls in an organized fashion, displaying their call load and call status. It will even automatically email the technicians their service calls when they are entered into the system. At a recent trade show ENX had a chance to sit down with Wes McArtor, president, and Bud Karakey, VP of operations, and discussed some of their newer products. Thanks for sitting down and talking about BEI. Can you give us a little history lesson about BEI? Wes: I would love to. Greg Moseley and I started BEI in 1993, primarily on the belief that independent dealers would benefit from data that showed real world, in the field performance of the devices they sold. For the first time our customers would be able to tell the difference between a machine performance issue and local issue, be it technician, application, environment or page volume. As we evolved we discovered dozens of other management tools that could be developed to assist a dealer's management team. We also invented the industry's first page-based compensation models for technicians and sales people, as well as the first of its kind territory management software. So what does this all mean? Can you explain in a little more detail how your service benefits a dealer? Wes: Let's take a real world example. Here is a customer whose cost per page is .00502, compared to .00371 nationally. It doesn't look like much for this one model but their cost of service is over $10,000 dollars higher than it should be based on the more than 8,000,000 copies produced. In fact because their Average Monthly Volume is slightly higher, their cost should be lower than the average. With the break out of parts and labor we can see that both are issues. Further analysis will allow us to identify why their cost is higher and begin working at reducing their expense and increasing their profit. That's really quite remarkable. How do dealers manage these issues without BEI? Wes: Quite frankly they don't. Most rely on the manufacturer's expectation for cost per page with the hope that they can service it in a way that makes them money. Even if they can monitor the cost of their own population of equipment they have no reference point as to what is real. Case in point, I had a prospect that was hitting most of the common industry benchmarks for profitability and service department performance. After performing our free analysis of his department he asked me, "Why do I need BEI if I'm already hitting my benchmarks?" My response was, "Would 15% more profit be a good reason?" He took the challenge and in 18 months we increased their GP in service by over 18%. Without a reference point you have no idea what's possible. Bud: This is the one of the reasons we developed the Service Reporting Software. We feel it is very important for dealers to know what their cost per page is on every machine. Dealers using one of the three ERP systems like e-Automate, ECI-OMD or ECI-La Crosse have data extract programs already built into their software to extract the data we need to get that information. However there are thousands of dealerships that don't use anything for service reporting, and they are unable to get this information or use our products. Our Service Reporting Software will now allow these dealers to have this type of information along with all the BEI Services reporting benefits that will show them where their service issues are. So once you discover their issues what can be done to improve things? Wes: By and large most issues can be resolved by doing what we all know SHOULD be done. What we've found to be very effective is simply to pay the technicians in a way that they are compensated to do their jobs better. When managing the right compensation model, most of our customers see a dramatic improvement in their service performance immediately. Did you know that almost 60% of the service calls that happen are the result of how the technician services the device, and not a device issue alone? How is that possible? Wes: There are a lot of factors when measuring a technician's performance and one of those is the FCE (First Call Effectiveness). This is the technician's ability to fix the call the first time without incurring a call back or having to return with parts. So if your FCE is 41% that means that 59% of the time when the customer calls, the tech will have to go back for parts or a call back. Understanding what contributes to a low or bad FCE is one of the focuses we point out for our customers. We even provide detailed data reports displaying this information down to the model level or tech level per model. If I have a high call back percentage due to technician performance, we have technician training issue. If I have a high call back percentage due to parts (HP), that indicates a parts supply issue. Bud: Another tool we provide to help increase FCE is our territory management product. This product allows dealers to create territories quickly and effectively, and then generates a list of the parts the technicians should carry in their car stock. This alone can increase FCE dramatically by reducing the amount of time the techs have to return with parts. With so much attention and focus today on Managed Print Services (MPS), how does BEI Services help dealers in this area? Wes: MPS creates a number of unique challenges for the both the MFP and Printer centric dealers. For the traditional MFP dealers, acquiring pages without selling the hardware is new ground. This involves the acquisition of multiple brands of hardware without the usual support resources that goes with selling the hardware. Printer dealers are having to change their business model to accommodate cost per page, and have the issue of capturing MFP devices that require much more service. What both of these have in common is the necessity of understanding the costs and manpower requirements of these initiatives. Bud: As Wes has mentioned, it is critical for dealers to know this important data, especially with MPS. As dealers acquire fleets of products to support and service, they really need to know which ones are doing well, but more importantly, which ones are doing poorly and costing them money. There is a management principle saying I like to use, "You cannot manage that you cannot measure." BEI Services measures the all of the angles of performance in the service departments, to allow the dealers to better manage them. BEI Services also offers dealers a no cost, free trial of their performance products to prove the value of their offerings. If you are interested in this free trial, you can contact Bud Karakey directly at 307-250-7214 or email him at bud.karakey@beiservices.com