It’s not about clipping the ticket on the hardware or the service.
I feel empowered when my clients tell me they want to print less. As an independent industry consultant and advisor to end clients, I sit in a unique position. I don’t make an income from devices or their toner supplies and their service volumes that they generate.
Therefore in my role as a trusted advisor I can be totally agnostic to the solution design based on the client’s business requirements and objectives. I have no preconceived solution (product, brand or service), no wheelbarrow to push. I can be fluid and as agile as the client needs and requires.
In this day and age you have to be outcome focused and aligned to what the customer is trying to achieve both in the short and long term. Some customers have a goal to eradicate print totally while others want to reduce print volumes and the assets that produce print over a reasonable period.
However, in both cases what they (the customers) are trying to avoid is the conflict of interest they see from many MPS providers. The issue boils down to this: “The provider has a conflict.”
The conflict is that you may be impacting their interests if you want to reduce or limit printing in the office.
Ask yourself these questions: How successful has the current MPS contract been to reduce print volumes and devices? How much focus have you seen from your provider in helping you take initiatives to reduce print volumes? Have they worked with you to help set targets to reduce printing?
Who is assisting you with your internal digital transformation?
Now, coinciding with an MPS strategy, customers should be seeing or at least having the conversation around how to better integrate and leverage the digital transformation taking place within the customer’s environment as well as how the customer engages with the marketplace.
As a simple example, how is your provider engaging with your business today around production or commercial printing (i.e. external printing), mailroom digitization or digital communications (such as e-mailing policy renewal documents to end customers) or helping you manage your digital assets? These services extend out to how you manage your systems of engagement such as your content management systems, document management systems, records management, and practice management, and so on. Other areas such as accounts payables and accounts receivables should be very clearly in the sites of the MPS providers as this in most cases is a no-brainer as both the payback period is very short and the cost savings due to greater efficiencies are very evident.
Today, more and more of our engagement with end clients is focused on helping and advising them around the steps in moving from the slow physical paper based world to the faster new mobile-based platforms that are quickly being optimised for the digital economy.
That means working and transforming old paper-based processes and workflows that are now out of step with the digital workflow and processes that move and repurpose digital content at real time speeds. Paper, well that only gets in the road and slows both the business and the workforce down.
So having by having this perspective we can better ensure that all leakage points across the digital ecosystem can be captured, while at the same time helping to protect and reduce the risk of the client from providers that don’t necessarily having the same business driver as the client.
Know thy provider
The case in point; if you work for a hardware brand or sell hardware, you’ll find your clients becoming more and more suspicious of your sales model. Financing the solution can also be a smoke and mirrors play and customers that have been caught out in the past are the best references to understand the importance of price and contract transparency. This does not mean all financing is bad; on the contrary, financing the asset and services is an effective way to turn the business expense from a capital expenditure into an operating expense.
When I see providers saying they are independent, I know what they are really trying to say is that they work with a few brands and they are relatively independent based on the client wanting to choose the brands they stock or support.
In fairness it is very difficult for a MPS provider (independent or not) to support all brands (let alone device models, supplies, parts) in the market (in most cases around 16 different brands can exist in most markets).
Fortunately both common sense and costs restrict providing support and access to all brands.
