Looking Inside OKI Data’s Total Managed Print Web Portal with OKI’s Tim Brien OKI Data Americas is changing the way business technology dealers, VARs, and managed service providers (MSPs) look at managed print services thanks to their Total Managed Print (TMP) Web Portal, introduced in June. TMP expands OKI’s existing MPS program and is available at no cost to OKI channel partners. What’s more, it makes the challenging world of managed print services less challenging, whether it’s a MSP delving into it for the first time or an experienced MPS provider looking to broaden their existing program. Tim Brien The cloud-based TMP portal features a suite of nine brand-agnostic services that can expand and augment a dealer’s new or existing MPS model. Because it’s a modular and scalable solution, OKI channel partners can leverage all nine modules of the Portal, or pick and choose which components best meet their requirements. The TMP Portal provides a comprehensive toolkit, including best practice methods for assessing, monitoring, and optimizing fleet management for organizations of all sizes. It also automates processes that many dealers currently perform manually, provides unbiased recommendations for print optimization across all brands and technologies, and offers a simple, step-by-step process with online support to maximize a dealer’s managed print engagement. The Portal supports a variety of data capture formats from vendors such as PrintFleet, FMAudit, and Print Audit, and is designed as a modular and flexible solution for dealers who are already well versed in MPS as well as those just starting to market MPS. Recently Tim Brien, director of MPS for OKI, shared additional details about the TMP program, how the target market is reacting to the solution as well as plans for evolving the program beyond where it is today. TMP and the Web portal is a great concept and a perfect fit for dealers and MSPs and seems to offer a boatload of flexibility. Brien: The great thing about TMP is that it’s a completely brand agnostic system, which is also extremely modular. It allows all of our dealers and MSPs to choose the different options they want to have in house or the functions they want to outsource to OKI’s Total Managed Print program. The TMP’s Web-based interface makes it easy for dealers to get up and running on the portal once they log into OKI’s BPX (Business Partner Exchange) system, which is available to all OKI dealers. This is a big advantage, isn’t it? Brien: This is a key function that really differentiates OKI’s Total Managed Print program from a lot of the others on the market. Because the system was designed to be utilized by companies already having existing MPS knowledge or infrastructure, up to those with no MPS knowledge or infrastructure, we’re basically taking all the guesswork out of creating a managed print services engagement. Being a vendor-neutral system, does this appeal to a broad range of dealers? Brien: The OKI solution allows the dealer to interject different types of hardware if they happen to be an HP, Canon, or Kyocera dealer as well as take all those additional devices that aren’t going to be replaced and place them under a managed print services engagement along with their costs and substituting any of the features they already have. If they already have their own servicing entity, their own supplies they’re going to fulfill, they can select which pieces they currently supply themselves or which pieces they’d like to outsource from the TMP program. Who would be the typical user within the dealer organization? Brien: The OKI TMP solution typically supports three different types of users—the administrator who loads products and administers the entire portal, the owner/manager of the dealership, and the sales rep. The administrator is usually the first person to access the system and can set basic information such as the name of the dealer’s MPS program. The administrator can also set minimum margins on hardware, service, and supplies that sales reps aren’t allowed to go below unless they receive such permissions from the owner/manager. Besides recommending devices, what else can the system evaluate? Brien: In addition to recommending devices, the system evaluates the dealer’s device offerings and identifies the best device by price, utilization, size and fit for each customer. If everything is even, the system selects the device recommended by the dealer. For example, the administrator might enter OKI, HP, and Kyocera devices, accessories, service plans, and consumables into the system. They can load their own pricing into the system as well. There’s also a default way to load OKI products, which will save the administrator a fair amount of time. The dealer has full control of the products loaded in the system and the products that are automatically picked by the system. How does the back-end service from GAP Intelligence fit in? Brien: OKI subscribes to a back-end service from GAP Intelligence, which provides us with data on more than 10,000 products on a weekly basis, including new products as well as street pricing and competitive specs. This is a useful feature and tool, especially since dealers typically don’t invest in this type of service. The ability to quickly access this information can save a dealer hundreds of hours compared to tracking this information down on their own. Remote monitoring is integrated with a personalized supplies fulfillment component. What’s so special about that? Brien: The great thing about personalized supplies fulfillment is the fact that as you look at what dealers are requiring, people are looking less and less to stock internally. The entire market is moving towards just-in-time inventory fulfillment and that’s one of the benefits of managed print services. You’re looking to take things off the customer’s hands, and this system does that. All toner ships directly to the customer’s location and can be directed to a specific department or location within that organization. This component of OKI’s TMP portal is proactive in that it consolidates shipments, shipping the customer the toner they need today along with what they’ll be needing for the next several days. You’ve described continuous fleet optimization and reporting as one of the most important elements of the program, why is that? Brien: As we look at TMP and managed print services in general, one of the things people forget to do on a long-term basis is managing the customer’s environment. They come in, initially propose a new scenario and bring the customer onboard, but there’s nothing in their constant reporting mechanisms, and the customer goes into this stage of focusing on how [their environment] is producing. You’ve created a process in which the system automatically looks at all the customer data through the remote monitoring system whether it’s monitored by the dealer or via OKI’s TMP remote monitoring system. Brien: We can look at all those devices on a regular basis, then take that information and automatically send reports to the end users or sales reps telling them this account is “falling off” from an optimized state and these are the devices that need to be changed out. This not only provides the customer or sales rep with this information, but also automatically creates a proposal for them as well as all their lease documents with automatic notifications and paperwork filled in and sent in an e-mail with their dealership’s logo on it. Now that we have a better feel for the program, how is the Total Managed Print program going and growing? Brien: The program itself is in full swing. We’ve on-boarded quite a few partners, but aren’t releasing the exact number. I would say this has been the most successful launch OKI has ever had from the standpoint of bringing on new partners and successfully selling—not OKI selling into their base, but them selling into their base with the assistance of OKI, the TMP program, and the TMP sales reps. How have you been marketing the program since it was introduced? Brien: We have some select partnerships we’re utilizing in order to get to market. We’re utilizing some of their forums, everything from Web-based information systems to their communities, and their live events where we participate as a high-level sponsor. We’re a Platinum Sponsor for the SMB Nation conference and have a huge exposure level there. We’re also a sponsor at Enable Technologies coming up in October, which is another RMF solution for the MFP industry. We’re doing IP Nation Partner Summit for ConnectWise, and AutoTask has asked us to be part of their road show events all across the country. Is there any way you can characterize the dealers who have been most receptive to TMP to this point? Brien: In the MSP world it can be somebody who has anywhere from 2 to 3 employees up to 15 to 20 employees. I met with [an MSP] four weeks ago who is coming on board and has 87 locations in three different countries. Why do you think this program appeals to them? Brien: They have a massive client base. OKI just finalized our first deal with them and the first pilot program was an account that had in excess of 3,000 devices. They go into a large enterprise, do a lot of facilities management, network support, that sort of thing, but don’t have the internal resources to turn around and bring managed print services. Quite frankly, it’s the same problem that everybody has. In order to truly and effectively roll out an entire solution North America wide, it would probably take them a year to a year and a half to figure everything out, source all the tools, develop tools internally, and change their billing system…the whole nine yards. In any size organization that can be an extremely long process. So going to something like the TMP portal and TMP program really does give you everything from the start all the way to the finish. What components tend to be the most popular with dealers as they pick and choose from the various ones you offer? Brien: The most important pieces are those that can be automated. Anything that’s labor intensive or manual, if you can automate that, that’s a must have. The most popular by far is the analytics and the proposal generation tools. The reason is they truly simplify what it is they’re trying to do. The others are more infrastructure-based tools. They’re extremely important and have a higher impact than the proposal and analytics tools, but their impact is in the background, supplying the billing system, third-party service, third-party supplies, OKI supplies, national service firms’ devices, and report generation. All that’s operational, which isn’t as elegant or exciting as getting that proposal created in a timely manner. What kind of feedback are you getting from your dealers and MSPs that indicate you’re on the right track? Brien: They’re saying, ‘This allows us to get into the game without a huge investment.’ ‘It’s simple.’ ‘In the first 45 days I got a 10 percent increase in profitability in my company.’ Those are the best pieces of feedback that tell me we’re on the right track. We’ve received some great testimonials from some of the MSPs. They’re the ones who get up and running the quickest because it is an extension of their business model. And the overall sales process is much faster because they’re typically contracted to take care of the entire infrastructure versus some of the BTA partners who are only managing one portion of it. I find they have a longer sales cycle while the MSPs are really hitting it faster and getting up and running very quickly where typically they’ve never done this type of business before. What’s been the biggest challenge of rolling this out? Brien: The volume of people and ensuring we have the right resources internally set up so that as they bring on the program they know what to do. When it comes to the MSP, it’s because they’re using the entire solution. It’s much more simplistic than if we’re looking at some of our larger partners who have developed programs and we’re integrating different aspects of the solutions, because then we have to integrate with their [existing] monitoring system. That obviously takes time from a technical standpoint. But if you’re turning around and going onboard with the complete TMP solution it’s extremely quick. You can be up and running, and doing your first assessment within a 24-hour period. Dealers and MSPs have the option of branding it however they’d like; what are you seeing when it comes to branding? Brien: Smaller organizations typically will stay with something fairly simplistic or generic, which is their company logo. And then sometimes they’re putting “Powered by OKI’s Total Managed Print.” The larger organizations obviously want to turn around into complete customization of the brand, creating almost a new brand image. So they’re going into everything from micro sites to full on Web presences, to complete new corporate entities. How will you gauge the success of this program? Brien: By the combination of number of dealers we sign on, but the true success is how fast they penetrate their base and what percentage of their base gets penetrated with TMP within a time period. It sounds exciting to say you sign 100 customers a month but it’s only good if 100 customers a month truly penetrate into their customer base. How do you see the TMP program evolving beyond where it is today? Brien: Funny you ask that because we’re already planning the release date of TMP version 2. Everything we developed was developed on the TMP team. We just brought in an additional four resources to work on the TMP portal program. From that point we’re going to expand the functionality of the portal as well as the third-party supplies and services portion of it. The tools associated to that will be expanded greatly as well as the Web-based infrastructure. Without telling you too much, you might be seeing some multi-lingual stuff coming out in the near future and obviously OKI is looking to utilize these tools on a global basis as well. Scott Cullen has been writing about office technology since 1986 and is a regular contributor to ENX magazine.