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Executive Debrief
Managing your Customer's Data
It's you, not your competitor or hardware vendor, who manages all of your customers' fleets. You do it using a single, consolidated online tool. Your goal is to make a customer a customer for life. It's straight from Marketing 101. Anyone can sell a printer. And many do, never hearing from the customer again, at least not about that particular printer. But manage that printer --- and all others on the network --- and you get into service plans, analyzing usage patterns, automatic replenishment of consumables, and more. You position yourself to make recommendations for new hardware solutions based on usage patterns, and even how to save the company money by
making strategic recommendations on where & how their
documents be delivered. In this scenario, the printer is not the end of the document-flow, but merely midpoint in a larger strategy.
We recognized that our software and expertise is needed to
assist companies with equipment purchases, asset identification, and baseline
cost structures, Service Level and Vendor Governance, and other critical areas
that determine expense reduction execution for the client.
Printer IQ + Business
Intelligence = Satisfied Customer
That's managing Printer fleets!
Grant's Tech Tip
Illegal IP addresses for
devices
Any IP address that has a '0' or '255' in the last octet is
an illegal IP address. PrinterRx will not discover, nor monitor any devices
defined on such IP addresses. These include:
x.x.x.0
x.x.x.255
A '0' or '255' in the last octet is a special value in the TCP/IP convention:
The zero is used to specify routing, and as such, asking for data at an address
of x.x.x.0 will give unpredictable results.
The 255 is used for broadcasting and as such, asking for data at an address of
x.x.x.255 will also give unpredictable results.
For more information refer
to:
printerRx
Support portal
PrinterRx training highlight
Color Coding in
PrinterRx
Items within the various reports in PrinterRx appear in
various colors. The colors refer to:
Red - Items appear in red when they reach a
specified threshold
Green - Print servers shown in green have been
recently discovered
Red - Desktop printers in red if last update is not
recent
These thresholds can be customized by selecting PrinterRx status in the
Administration section. In the pWeb Users section of the panel that appears,
select the Preferences link to access the screen to change preferences.
Other colors refer to:
Purple - These are tool tips which provide valuable
information when you place the mouse over the item.
Blue underline - links to other pages when
selected.
All color coded items can be customized to desired
thresholds.
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Optimizing Corporate Printing
Our last
newsletter discussed how corporations sustain their corporate-wide print strategy
through monitoring & measuring the printer fleet on an on-going basis.
This month we will provide a recommended procedure to follow to optimize
corporate printing.
The direction of optimizing printing is to reduce – to reduce total costs, to reduce the amount of printing, to reduce the number of devices, to reduce the number of manufacturers and models, and to reduce the number of vendors. If you are the only vendor providing this regular report card on printing, you have an advantage to increase the number of devices you manage and to offer additional consulting services in other areas of managed print services.
Best practices in optimizing corporate printing follow four steps to better manage the corporate spending in printing: Analysis & Strategy, Deployment, Optimization, and Sustainment. Best practices recognizes that the Printer fleet is a corporate asset, and thus, should be managed as any other IT asset.
Analysis & Strategy
Assessment is one of the hottest areas that Corporations are considering. Most companies do an assessment every 5 or 6 years. Before any print strategy can be developed, a baseline should be established. During baseline assessment, all costs are incorporated into the picture – not just consumables - the biggest cost being human resources. If
you already have a database of device inventory, activity and events, your revenues can be increased by offering these assessment services
to your client or by reducing costs through continuous printer management. Best practices conclude that this assessment and strategy development phase should be hardware vendor independent.
The baseline assessment is used as the kick-off point for developing a corporate print strategy.
Deployment
After assessment and strategy development, Corporations implement their print
strategy. Deployment is a critical phase where Managed Service Providers get or retain the managed services contract.
A competitive managed print services proposal can be put together based upon the inventory and understanding of their client’s printing history – this database developed through monitoring devices. A greater knowledge than both your client or competitor is a significant strategic advantage.
Optimization
Once the fleet strategy is deployed, printing and printers are optimized through pro-active monitoring of printer assets, contracts, supplies management, and service level agreements. Developing a device retirement strategy for your customer with an understanding of their business needs, may ensure that you retain or increase your contract and manage the new devices. As with every aspect of managed print services, a tool which collects and stores this device and printing data is necessary to support the intelligent recommendations you provide your customer.
Sustainment
The key to sustaining the savings reaped from managing printing is measure, adjust, measure adjust on a continuous and ongoing basis. This is where
you can retain and increase business by proactively demonstrating value with
regular report cards on your customer’s printing – including trend graphs showing pages, costs, and problems. This report card should provide areas where improvements can be made such as removing, swapping, or replacing – always with an eye to managing more of the corporation’s devices in combination with reducing total printing costs. Of course, a tool, such as PrinterRx, is required to continuously monitor the corporate print environment and generate the data for such a report card.
If you know more than your customer about his printer fleet and can provide him cost savings recommendations, you are on your way towards reaping additional revenue with this knowledge you possess.
Get more
information on a PrinterRx solution
Who owns the Business Intelligence
of your customers?
Who really owns the business intelligence for your customers surrounding printing assets?
And who will ultimately be satisfying the Customer?
Is it the Manufacturer, Service Provider, Reseller or Client?
Many printer and MFP manufactures are enticing partners and service providers with fleet management software and services. The most attractive part of this offering for the service providers and hardware sales channels is
that it is FREE! The idea is for the manufacturer to gather all data associated with their reseller or partner’s customer! Sounds great, sign me up.
But wait, in the history of business, the most expensive part of a supply chain is the middleman right? Who
is the middleman? If do not manufacture printers, toner, parts you are
the middleman!
As products and services mature, they reach the commoditization stage. Printers, Copiers, toner have already reached this phase in the market. The true value in a managed print service environment is to provide business intelligence to effectively manage your clients' printing assets. This is what separates Managed Service companies from the
Manufacturer.
Take notice, the large Manufacturers are rapidly moving to the Managed Service Model!
The intellectual capital you gain from servicing your clients should be held in the highest regard.
This is the differentiator between you and your competitors. By the way, the FREE software you are receiving from the Manufacturer is housed on their servers and being data mined for future opportunities. The same FREE software you are receiving is being utilized to determine if
it would be more profitable for the Manufacturer to sell
to your client direct or if they will allow you to continue to manage the account. Not an envious position to be in, considering it was your dollar that your business was built on!
My father always said, “Son, whoever has the most data controls the meeting.”
So next time your offered a FREE Lunch, politely decline and pick up the tab yourself. In the end it will be your destiny that you are controlling!
What looks like it is FREE will cost you and your Managed Services organization more than you can imagine
over the next coming years. Your organization has worked
hard over the years to build a strong business. They are your clients, your relationships and the intelligence is yours why give it away for FREE?
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