You’d think by now there wouldn’t be much left to say about MPS. How much more can we beat that horse? Turns out, plenty more, especially when you speak with folks in the document imaging industry who are still doing their part to help dealers and resellers get a grip on MPS and be profitable with it.
Tons of companies offer MPS programs and education or are rolling out new programs, indicating there’s still a market, even if some segments of the industry are doing their best to commoditize it. (See the article “How to Combat the Commoditization of MPS in Your Marketplace” in ENX/The Week in Imaging at www.enxmag.com). A second article, “Faltered States” that looks at common areas dealers and resellers falter with MPS will also appear this month in ENX/The Week in Imaging.
To get a better sense of just how viable MPS remains and the assistance available to dealers and resellers starting out, or those struggling, we spoke with various industry players with a legacy of providing MPS education, programs, and services.
The Tipping Point
For dealers and resellers only now getting into MPS, what’s the tipping point that finally inspired them to follow a path that was blazed long ago by so many others?
Doug Johnson
“Because they’re losing key accounts,” responds Doug Johnson, president of RedSage Group and formerly SVP, Managed Print Services for Supplies Network. “Most dealers have 10 or 20 signature accounts that not only offer great visibility, but provide a significant portion of their revenue. When they lose any of them to a competitor due to MPS that’s when they realize they need help.”
“Dealers that are just now launching an MPS program have typically lost a big customer to a competitor with an MPS program, or have lost business to competitors with MPS programs over time and it’s adding up,” adds Ray Loisel, senior vice president MPS, West Point Products. “For dealers with existing programs that come to Axess for support, the tipping point is usually one of two key things; the first is pricing pressure and a need for assistance when calculating TCO. The second tipping point comes from a frustration with processes related to supply fulfillment or management of contracts. Regardless of the dealer’s need, it’s my goal to understand their entire MPS program, because solving all the issues is where we can add the most value.”
Mike Lamothe
Mike Lamothe, founder of Office Document Consulting, an organization that provides dealers and OEMs with strategic support in MPS/MDS, continues to see new dealers embrace MPS. “We’ve had more questions in the last five to six months about ‘how do we do this’ or ‘we have a customer that wants this,’” reports Lamothe.
He attributes this trend to a greater awareness of customers about MPS and dealers not being able to answer their MPS-related questions.
Another tipping point is meter collection.
“That’s one of the biggest struggles dealers have,” says Jennie Fisher, senior vice president and general manager of the Office Equipment Group at GreatAmerica Financial Services Corp. “Making sure they have a process to do it in a timely manner and do it correctly.”
West McDonald
For West McDonald, vice president of business development, Print Audit, the tipping point that brings dealers to Print Audit for extra MPS help is when customers start asking them for ‘Print Governance’ products. “There are some that are sold directly to the customer. The dealer makes some margin on it and the customer then owns the entire Print Governance portion of managed print,” explains McDonald. “They start losing revenues because waste print starts to disappear and they start printing fewer e-mails in color, and they turn their arms up and say, ‘Good grief, we’re losing revenue because they’ve become more efficient.’ The tipping point is when they’ve had some pain in that spectrum and they want to have control and profit on it instead of losing revenue.”
The most compelling reason why dealers seek help from Toshiba and its Encompass MPS program according to Chief Marketing Executive Bill Melo, is its PageSmart offering where Toshiba provides them with a cost per page, which they can then mark up and provide to their customer.
Bill Melo
“That’s appealing because among the other benefits they get is automated toner fulfillment,” says Melo. “Pricing on MPS is a complicated matter because of all the different kinds of printers you might be managing. They’re all individual CPCs. This takes a lot of the guess work out of pricing. We make it easy for a dealer, and take a lot of the risks out for them.”
Last year was a record year for its Encompass program in terms of growth. Some of those taking advantage of it are large well-known dealerships looking to enhance their existing programs or decided it would be more efficient to have Toshiba administer their entire MPS program for them.
“I don’t think any dealer is 100 percent happy with their program from start to finish,” concedes Gary Willert, president of LMI. “Dealers are looking for some type of best practice to take their program to the next level.”
Help is Still on the Way
Let’s hone in on some of the ways these players are helping dealers either get started with MPS or enhance their existing programs.
“We’re certainly not the only deal in town, but for us and others like us, 2015-2016 is going to become the year of the user and ‘Print Governance,’” says McDonald. “That’s where we can help. Since 1999 we have a pedigree of monitoring and managing user printer behavior. We call it ‘Print Governance’. If you’re trying to get out of commoditization, you have to do more for end users than manage their print. Once you get past toner and service, workflow is the next natural progression and the only way to do that is a stronger focus on user print behavior. We can go into the print stream and help save customers an additional 30-40 percent over what they were probably saving on their traditional MPS program through Print Governance.”
Ray Loisel
“We can offer them a team of experts with a combined 40 years of experience helping dealers create successful MPS programs; we have seen it all,” explains West Point’s Loisel. “Furthermore, we have a robust suite of comprehensive and flexible MPS solutions that is comprised of the leading remote monitoring software platforms, a TCO pricing calculator and proposal generator for CPP, in-depth sales training, and auto toner fulfillment supplies replenishment. We also offer a full service option for dealers that prefer our team to manage their CPP contracts for them. Within our family of companies, we are partnered with the leading imaging supplies remanufacturers, a broad printer part distribution solution and free recycling programs. Needless to say, we have something for everybody, in all different stages of MPS.”
“Depending on the size of the dealership and the infrastructure they have in place, we have various ideas for them,” says LMI’s Willert. “We’ve got a program for smaller dealers where we do everything for them. All they have to do is sell and we have a complete infrastructure to support them from start to finish. Even larger dealers are looking at that model. It’s become popular because they know exactly how much to charge, how much they’re making, and no headaches. We see everything that’s going on in the country and can get certain nuggets from dealers who have been successful and we have many different plans, structures, and best practices that have worked for other dealers to share with them.”
After spending the past few years with Supplies Network and continuing that relationship as a consultant to the company, Johnson is well versed in how a third-party organization such as a Supplies Network and its mpsSelect program can assist dealers looking to enhance or build a Managed Print Services business through training, follow-up support, and ongoing consulting.
“They have a good handle on the assets and competencies needed for success in executing the sales and operations needed in a managed print services model in a customer’s account,” explains Johnson. “Their strength is around saying you don’t have to develop most of those competencies, particularly the care and feeding of those fleets once you’ve got them under contract.”
Jennie Fisher
GreatAmerica’s Fisher is quick to tout GreatAmerica’s strengths at helping dealers with MPS, even if the company no longer offers its Navigator educational program. A big part of that was around crafting the deal around a finance product and administering the deal. “We have the most knowledgeable people in the industry; we put our sales people through professional training, the leaders of the company educate our people and the value MPS brings to the dealer, what the process looks like at a high level, all the areas to do analysis, what techniques they can use to secure the appointment, steps to go through on the analysis and putting the deal together.”
Pinpointing the value that a GreatAmerica brings to the MPS process, Fisher cites the administration piece, the meter collection, and the education. “Administration and how we help them gain the efficiencies,” says Fisher, adding that GreatAmerica has the MPS Trustmark, which gives them a certain amount of credibility in the MPS space.
Dealers who come to ODC can take advantage of a process that integrates with FMAudit to provide an automated QVR (Query View Reporting). “The more sophisticated we get with processing that data and using that data, it becomes a significant benefit,” says Lamothe.
What ODC can do is help dealers who already have some basic knowledge of MPS learn how to leverage managed print software to provide consumables and service alerts, and assist them in moving up the ladder to workflow and process improvement.
“Because we work with FMAudit we’ve developed an approach where once we’ve done an assessment we strategize and build an approach for sales and take that data and completely focus on unmanaged devices inside their base,” explains Lamothe. “That’s where [we often find] 40-60 percent of devices in a dealer base are unmanaged. When I talk to dealers and I say if we can increase your base by 25 percent over the next couple of years what would that mean to you, their eyes light up.”
The Onus is on the Dealer
It’s one thing to take this education, training, and/or tools to help improve the dealership’s approach to MPS, but after the smoke clears, what is it that dealers need to do to ensure ongoing success?
“They need to be committed to doing it,” says Fisher. “They get into it, don’t understand it and don’t understand what it takes or they’re not getting the support from the owners of the company. If you don’t have buy in from the top and somebody being a champion of that, there’s going to be confusion and they’re going to struggle. That’s one of the biggest things we see. It comes down to investing in the tools and resources to do it efficiently. Sometimes when they see dollar signs and what it takes, they’re not willing to go in 100 percent.”
Gary Willert
Willert concurs with Fisher. “If the commitment is not there, everybody has their jobs to do and they gravitate towards what they’ve been doing for years. It’s making a conscious effort to change that environment and that dealership into thinking differently. That’s the biggest message we try to share—we can give you every tool, and all these marketing materials and videos, but it’s got to come from the top down. You have to be committed to making it successful. It’s not an easy thing to do. The presidents of these companies are under a lot of pressure from the OEMs to make quotas. How do they find time to make sure their MPS program is successful? That’s probably the biggest dilemma most dealers face.”
While Toshiba can manage the entire MPS process for its dealers, including selling it on their behalf, Melo says most BTA dealers in the program prefer to service the product themselves even though Toshiba can do that too. “A big part of the value proposition is being able to service the fleet with the same level of responsiveness and professionalism as they do with the MFPs.”
Another typical dealer must do is the billing. “Again we offer that, but most dealers want to keep control of the billing so being able to capture the meters, create a billing format that’s clear and concise and meets the customer expectations is definitely a dealer responsibility,” adds Melo.
“If we take a dealer on, it takes 18-24 months to get systems in place, speaking to each other, etc.” notes Lamothe who feels that sales reps still need to be able to go out into the field and present MPS in an intelligent manner. ODC has MPS in a tablet, an app they developed because sales reps were having a difficult time describing what MPS was to the customer and how to differentiate their offering from their competitors.
Print Audit has a 90-day program to make sure its dealers are successful. “We hand hold them to make sure they’re closing print governance and managed print deals,” says McDonald. “After that because they’re shadowing us and it’s more of a mentor-based program, they’re quite happy to run on their own and do the same thing.”
As long as dealers follow that lead they’ll be successful. In fact McDonald claims Print Audit has a 100 percent success rate with its Premiere Member dealers ever since they first signed them up for that program. “We have to do our best every month to ensure they’re happy Print Audit customers,” he says.
“As much as we would like, we can’t improve an MPS program if a dealer is not committed to the business model and doesn’t implement a sales process and manage their metrics,” adds Loisel. “In addition, if dealers do not extend recommended changes into the ‘back of the house’ processes within service and administration, it is very difficult for an MPS program to be successful. On the bright side, if a dealer is committed and willing to ‘champion’ their MPS program within a dealership, with our guidance, sales training and tools, they can become extremely successful.”
