|
Executive Debrief
Increasing your Managed Services Business
Increasing your revenues from managing print services requires the coordination of all parts of your organization
- from your Sales team and your Service technicians to your central administration team. The key is to get all parties working together, streamlined & using the same
information.
Unfortunately, this is going to involve dedication and a solid business plan to revamp your processes from selling & servicing units to offering a
managed service. Your customer does not care about the printer speed or that your invoice is delivered by carrier pigeon. All he requires is access to appropriate,
reliable output devices at the right price. He doesn't even want to think about it. After all it's not his core business - It's yours!
It's up to YOU to get your sales proposal process consistent & efficient, your service technicians cost effective, your Supplies Vendors reliable & price
competitive, your billing timely & accurate, and your business practices in line.
How do you go about aligning your business processes? Today we will
look at presales automation of pricing & proposals for Printer Fleet Management services.
Throughout our articles, you'll notice a central/decentral theme - centralize
your information & standards; decentralize your access.
If you would like more information concerning Assessment Automation and Price Configuration, please
contact us.
Grant's Tech Tip
Configuring for large installations
What is the optimal Server hardware configuration for printerRx for 5000 - 15000 devices?
Polling each device uses about 10 Kbytes out and 10 Kbytes in. In addition, 2 sec. / device would be an average worker time based on running either 128 or 256 worker threads.
Polling that many devices, at a 5-10 minute frequency from one server will definitely cause the network administrator to wake up and notice. You would be better off distributing multiple rXpress clients throughout the network to minimize the impact to the network and to reconsider polling frequency. This has the added benefit of staggering the rollups to the printerRx MSP server should this be required.
When volume testing with a 3 GHz dual core Dell, the bottleneck is not the cpu but disk access. Testing includes determining the benefits of running three SATA
disk drives. One drive for data, one for redo logs and one for system/sort.
For more answers to your questions refer to:
PrinterRx Support portal
|
Pricing and Proposal Automation - You better get it right the first time!
In our last newsletter
we identified the threats to your Managed Print Service business. This month we will help you increase your Printer Fleet Management business from the sales
perspective.
Many organizations are inadvertently slowing sales cycles and losing business due to inconsistencies in sales quoting, pricing and proposal
processes. If you are like 85% of organizations that construct product sheets and drive your pricing process with excel spreadsheets, you will have a slow start in
the Managed Services arena. Developing Cost per Page or Annuity Revenue Streams require more sophistication to the pricing configuration process than simple spreadsheet processes.
Here are some best practice pointers from the field on Pre-Sale Pricing Process for Printer Fleet Management:
• Assessment of Current Printing Architecture – Establish your prospect's current printing infrastructure by utilizing software
which captures a
baseline for proposal & pricing construction. Utilize software for assessment to automate and centralize printing assets in a single view to allow business
managers from Finance, Service, Sales and Marketing to validate & recognize trends.
This approach should be used for both prospects & especially existing customers
up for renewal.
• Price Configuration- Centralize
pricing configuration and decentralize access to sales team in order speed the process and accuracy of
solution deliverables to your client. Most organizations currently provide a financial analyst to construct pricing pro forma’s for the sales team to
present. This bottleneck process can take days and in most cases weeks. Product sheets, Service obligations, and
labor management associated with pricing and costing should
be configured in the central application to assure profitability and appropriate margins are maintained. Once business logic for pricing is established, your sales team should
have access to price configuration to prepare the solution to client.
• Price Approval- Once
the business logic is defined, unnecessary meeting and delays are avoided by automating Pricing and Proposal
Approval. Exception management can by instrumented through automated approval and sign off’s. Developing Cost per Page and other Annuity Revenue Models
require all business constituents (Finance, Service, Sales, and Marketing) to be vigilant and accountable to their segment of expertise. The predefined business
rules towards pricing and profitability can be defined and controlled in an easy manner. The end result is value creation to both the client and your
organization.
It is the organization's responsibility to assist sales professionals with the automation and simplification of pricing to the prospect. This is a critical step in the sales process that is often overlooked and taken for granted. As your organization moves to a Printer Fleet Management Service offering keep in mind the above three key elements for a successful Pre-Sales Process.
The ability for your sales team to configure annuity revenue opportunities on their own will gain them confidence in managed services you provide. The easier you make the transition from product sales to annuity opportunities the more success your organization will experience. Invest in better business practices around your current pricing and configuration delivery or you may find your business going the way of the dinosaur.
Automated Toner Ordering
Yes, we are able to issue emails for supply reorders on low toner or at a specified toner percentage. That’s trivial. Sounds great doesn’t it? But what happens in real life???
There is a caveat when putting toner reordering into practice. Discrepancies can happen when the cartridge is
shaken and toner is no longer low (or moves to higher toner level than the threshold). Then the toner goes low again and another email is issued.
So, unless there is intelligence on the ordering end, toner may pile up.
The solution is much more complicated that issuing an automated supply reorder upon a threshold level.
In early fall, we will release “toner intelligence” as part of printerRx. Using intelligent analysis of the toner level/low messages in combination with historical yields
and printer duty cycles, printerRx will intelligently provide ONLY ONE message for automated supply ordering and at the optimal time. Based on specific printer history,
we may be able to provide an estimate of the number of pages (images) and time remaining to toner out.
And printerRx will not rely on percent remaining. Firstly, many devices most in fact, including many new models, do not
report toner levels (as a %) only “good”, “low” and “out”. And what does percentage mean? The difference between a high volume production printer and a
departmental printer for 10 percentage points of a toner can be 10,000 pages. A toner order should really be on low toner, because that is when the manufacturer
has designated the “appropriate time to reorder supply”.
So, use the automated messaging for toner low or toner level for now, but highly intelligent toner reordering is
coming soon…September time frame
Get more information on a printerRx solution
Recommend This Newsletter To A Friend Do you have a friend or colleague who might enjoy this newsletter? Please forward it to him or her and point out the
subscription page
|
