Art Post
The other day I received an e-mail from Monte Jensen of KBA Docusys and a Print4Pay Hotel member on the West Coast. He was pretty excited because they were releasing a new color page model being billed for ‘as low as 2 cents per page!’ This is for their Kyocera line of color MFPs. This peaked my interest and I replied that I’d like to know more about how this is possible.
What Monte told me was that their color page was 2 cents based on 2 percent coverage. I thought how the heck are they going to do that? Last I knew, the only manufacturer that was capable of doing that was Xerox and only with their ColorQube MFP series. Monte was not clear on all of the details about how Kyocera was able to accomplish this and I hadn’t heard that Kyocera was capable of this.
So, I dug and dug and found out that Kyocera may had launched this coverage-based CPC plan last year in Europe, and may have had some pilot programs here in the US. Now, I knew it existed and needed more info. I sent many e-mails last night and low and behold a Print4Pay Hotel member from Canada confirmed that Kyocera does indeed have a three-tier system coverage based CPC plan. Here’s what he told me:
“The new series of Kyocera colour MFP’s that was introduced last summer provides the means to set three tiers of counter for colour based upon the coverage of colour on the page. This permits setting three price levels based upon the amount of colour coverage. The settings can be adjusted by the dealer to fit their price model.
It means you don’t have to pay a full colour page price when you print a small colour item, say a logo, if the contract is set up this way.
We just won a large contract and the ability to do three tier colour pricing was a big factor in the win.”
My initial thoughts centered on “I wish I had this,” and then I remembered multiple customers that would benefit from 2 percent color coverage based on 2 cents a page.
I see this is a great talking point with customers, especially those customers that use very little color, such as for letter head, logos, and maybe highlighting something in a letter. Basically any Kyocera Dealer or Kyocera direct branch will be able to configure the allowable toner coverage and then set a price for each coverage tier. I don’t have any information on the pricing nor the coverage for the other tiers, but I think most may try and follow what was done on the ColorQube a few years ago.
All of this raises a few additional questions if this will now be the norm billing for maintenance and supplies for color MFP’s:
- Would you now have to conduct a color coverage analysis of user’s documents? That would make sense to give them some sort of understanding of what type of color coverage they are using.
- Does the 2 percent coverage really mean 8 percent coverage? With color we talk about 20 percent color coverage because there are four toner cartridges with the manufacturer stating yields for 5 percent coverage per color.
- Could we eventually have more than a three-tier plan for cost per page coverage?
- Could customers pay more if they aren’t in tune with their color page coverage?
- How much does it cost to administer a plan like this?
- Is there some documentation provided from Kyocera that will show customers what 2 percent color coverage is, or 4 percent or 8 percent?
I could probably think of ten more questions to add, but I’ll save those for a later date as I get more information. I’m not saying this is a bad or a good thing. Years ago in one of my blogs I made a statement that I thought this would be the norm sometime in the future. It seems like the future is here. I would love to hear from others on this!
Good Selling!
