PRINT LESS – EARN MORE MPS! MPS! MPS! It’s the savior of our industry! It’s the most profitable thing in our business since zinc oxide paper! It’s easy to sell! It locks in accounts and profits! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s bullsh**t! WHAT? Sorry, that must have slipped through my fingers to the keyboard. But, in many ways, my fingers may be right. MPS (Managed Print Services) may not be the fastest way to the end of the rainbow. We’ve all heard that MPS strategies will result in an increase in page volume coupled with a corresponding increase in service and supply revenue. Yes or no? The answer, in consultant-speak, is “yes,” but, sometimes, “no.” The strategy often results in a dramatic increase of incremental page volume. This happens most often when you assume management of an existing fleet of printers which you are not currently servicing. In other words, these printers have been sold by someone else. As such, all of the page volume generated by these devices will be incremental to you – at least in the beginning of the contract (more on this in a bit). Let’s look at the other end of the spectrum for a moment. Hardware covered by these contracts would consist of MFPs along with some printers (and, perhaps a few fax units thrown in for good measure) sold by you. In other words, this is your account and you were already selling service and supplies to support the existing page volumes. In these cases, your revenue and margins for servicing and supplying the fleet might actually decrease. Our research has con-sistently shown that combined margins for hardware, service, supplies and financing can be higher than the margin earned for MPS contracts on your own fleet. It’s much more difficult to compare price when each component is priced separately and combined into a single cost per page. Base your offering on price alone with no other value add, and you’ll lose the contract on that basis. But, back to page volume. Successful MPS engagements go far beyond capturing the page volume of a printer fleet or your own MFP units. The real savings come, not from selling supplies for less, but from reducing the total pages printed through the use of a compre-hensive workflow analysis. Consider a few examples from your own experience. • Do you really need a directory of all physicians in your HMO plan, or would you rather know if the physician you need is in the plan? • Do you own any stock? When was the last time you read the extensive 10K report sent to you? How about the annual report? • For you “older” readers – do you really need a hardcopy prescription statement every month (calculate 3 – 4 pages x 12 months x number of subscribers), or would you rather know when you are getting close to the allowance cap? How much of this winds up in the circular file? How much should never have been printed in the first place? How many examples do you have in your own accounts? What would the impact be in any of these accounts if you conduct a workflow analysis to reduce overall page volume by 10%? I can hear multitudes now. “Are you crazy? I’m trying to increase pages and you’re giving me strategies to reduce that number?” Well, I may be crazy for a bunch of other reasons, but not this one. If you capture a fleet of printers generating, say, 100,000 pages per month and reduce volume by 10%, you’re still left with 90,000 pages per month that you didn’t have before. If each page currently costs $0.02, you’ve reduced your customer’s cost by $200 per month, or $7,200 over the life of the contract. But, you still gain revenue and margin from the remaining 90,000 pages. $7,200 buys a lot of toner! A few years ago, Lexmark ran a series of broadcast ads stating (and I paraphrase), “Other companies show you how to print for less. We show you how to make less prints.” I don’t know what happened to the campaign, but the message could not be more relevant in today’s market. Show your MFP customers how to reduce print volume, and cost per page becomes secondary. Another method can be used to increase your margins with respect to supplies. This is the part of this article that your manufacturer is going to hate. We’ve alluded to software that we’ve tested that allows you to incrementally reduce the amount of toner the printer uses. This can be any printer from any brand. This is not the same as an all-or-nothing toner-save or draft mode found on many printers. This setting can be adjusted in a manner that allows you to tone down the amount of toner spread on the page while still providing prints that look as good as those using the printer’s default print settings. Imagine being able to reduce your customer’s toner consumption by 10% - 20% without making their documents look any different. While your MFP manufacturer obviously wants you buying as much toner as possible, what if you could still get that penny/page from your customer but reduce the amount of toner you’re buying by that same 10% - 20%? I’m no rocket scientist but I’m smart enough to know that if I sell my clicks for the same amount and reduce the amount of toner I buy each month, I’m going to make more money. Contact us ( info@industryanalysts.com ) to find out more about this soft-ware. This is money on the table and we can show you how to get it. Whether you’re reducing your customer’s print volume or the amount of toner they use, the message is still the same. Print less. Earn more. What a country! Andy Slawetsky is President of Industry Analysts, Inc., a marketing and management consulting firm for the office automation industry. Much of the company’s research and testing results can be viewed on their website www.industryanalysts.com.