Hit The Managed Print Services Button

It was only a matter of time before the flight to managed services in the hardware space reached the printing and imaging sector, and over the past 18 months it has done so with vigor.

Done correctly, managed print services can be transformative. They can be a differentiator. And the technology and wherewithal are at VARs' fingertips now.

The CRN Test Center examined a new, cutting-edge managed print services offering for VARs that is now in pilot testing by Oki Data Americas Inc., the Mount Laurel, N.J.-based document imaging company. Reviewers also drew on the insight of solution providers to determine best practices for offering managed print services. Here are five steps the channel should take to deliver a managed print services solution that works:

Assessment
Most enterprises simply have no idea how much money they spend on printer hardware and accessories. Or, even worse, they thought they knew but were off by a country mile. That's where a top-to-bottom assessment of an enterprise's document output costs and hardware costs gets the ball rolling.

Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., Xerox Corp., Lexmark International Inc. and Oki Data are four vendors well-known for channel programs and presence in the document solutions space. In Oki Data's case, the company is now piloting a multistage program with 17 solution providers in the U.S. Here, Oki Data actually ships each VAR a Launch Kit that includes a questionnaire that the VAR goes through with the customer to gather information about deployed printing technology and workflow needs. It also includes a USB Assessment Key—a small USB device the size of a thumb drive that is installed into an endpoint on the network and searches the network for all attached printing devices through a simple SMTP application. The application files the information into a census that is repeated again at a later date. The solution provider ships the key and the completed questionnaire back to Oki Data, which uses the data to generate an assessment report for the solution provider that offers complete details on device usage, consumables usage, costs and potential areas of consolidation, management and savings.

At any stage in the process, the solution provider can opt to use its own assessment collection technology or analytics engine. The vendor offers them to channel partners that choose not to make that investment, Oki Data executives said.

Review
Once the assessment is completed, it's up to the VAR to explain the results to the customer. In the sample assessment report that Oki Data provided, the results began with an executive summary that noted the enterprise assessed spends $825,058.17 annually on its printed document fleet and identified potential annual savings of $358,395.60 through removal and re-deployment of assets, modification of standards and printer upgrades. That data is followed up with the news that the savings can be reaped through a one-time capital outlay of $176,070 or a monthly lease of $2,934.50 over the next five years for a technology refresh.

Yes, that is an awful lot to lay on a customer. But the assessment provides page after page of detail to support the bottom line. Some charts show system bottlenecks, while other charts show that 82 percent of all print jobs are simple Microsoft Word documents, Adobe Acrobat documents or e-mails.

Oki Data's analytics engine, based on data collected by the VAR, provides one example after another to show potential savings in an easy-to-understand manner.

Solution providers can also opt for vendor-neutral assessments. For example, if the customer is a law firm, it only takes a few questions to find out how much the law firm spends on overnight parcel delivery of text-based documents. By buying and deploying a multifunction printer (MFP) with scan-to-email capability, a text document might be better e-mailed via PDF or delivered via an FTP server and the physical document sent two-day mail. Savings could pay for an MFP within months.

Next: Consultation