ESP’s enVision PCS
In this continuing series of articles on power protection we’re looking at ways that dealers can leverage this technology to grow their business. Recently I interviewed Dave Perrotta, director of operations at ESP/SurgeX, to get a better idea of how dealers can best raise the issue of power protection with current clients and prospects.
Do you think imaging technology dealers are doing a good job of bringing up the issue of power protection with their clients?
Perrotta: They’ve done an excellent job of informing customers of the risks of not having power protection and the benefits of providing protection to the customer. It’s obviously a benefit to them in terms of reducing services calls and the savings on parts replacement, and it’s a benefit to the customer in the customer experience from the uptime.
Can you share some tips as to how a dealer can best introduce power protection to new and existing clients?
Perrotta: There’s a couple of ways that can be done. Number one is the protection itself. People are conditioned to buying power protection when they buy things from a personal standpoint; when you buy a new TV from Best Buy, for example, the first thing they want to do is sell you power protection. It’s a good idea to buy it as insurance against catastrophic events and also adds longevity to the equipment. Uptime is important to a lot of businesses and they understand that talk track.
The second part of that is now that we’ve introduced some energy saving features into our products such as energy management and monitoring, dealers can offer that as a service to their customers and show them how that can result in a return on investment.
Look at the energy savings and energy profile in the particular office space and talk about buying more energy efficient equipment, eliminating certain pieces of equipment that aren’t being used, and consolidating—it becomes part of the talk track to help them sell, and to help the customer get a feeling that they’re not only being sold a piece of office equipment, they’re also being sold a higher level of service.
How can energy monitoring and management services help customers, and in turn how can dealers sell those services?
Perrotta: A dealer can determine how he wants to monetize that particular aspect of the sale. One way is to offer energy audits. Go into a client’s location and say ‘I’m going to use the energy management devices to provide you with an energy audit and I can tell you exactly where your high use is so you can control it. I can provide you with a profile of the equipment being used to determine what you want to keep functioning and what you don’t want to keep functioning, or if you want to purchase more energy efficient equipment, and also inform you on the savings that can be attained when you turn devices fully off during hours of non operation.’
We can recommend schedules of when to turn equipment off and [how much money] can be saved by doing that. In addition to offering the audit, the dealer can show the customer how they can automatically schedule these devices to be turned on and off during off hours, and then look at the profiles of pieces of equipment to determine what’s being used, what’s not being used, and what needs to be replaced. That’s the way energy management can be used as a piece of the service plan.
What are some “dirty little secrets” about power in an office setting? How can they be used to sell power products?
Perrotta: Generally, many people think of it in terms of a catastrophic surge or a lightning strike. Or even a power pole or construction going on outside the building, and the power goes out and then there’s a large surge that takes everything out when it comes back on. That’s a very small part of the equation.
Eighty percent of the power anomalies that we try to educate people about and protect against occur inside the building. Most of these are non catastrophic, but are nuisance related in that they can cause lockups and unexplained error codes when you’re working on your PC or piece of office equipment and it locks up or throws an error code and you don’t know why.
Going further, we’ve demonstrated to people that these low levels of surges inside a building can also affect color quality and copy quality. ‘Why am I printing a job of 50 and by the time I print 35 my reds or yellows are much lighter than they were on the first print?’ Many times that’s related to power problems.
Surges inside the office can also lower the life expectancy of the equipment by constantly stressing power supplies. Several studies have been done on how many surges occur in a given facility. Some have recorded up to 50 or more per month. These can range from noise, to spikes and surges, to voltage sags. All of these things can wreak havoc on the equipment. When you’re servicing that equipment many times you don’t know why that equipment is not functioning or lasting to the extent it should.
How can energy diagnostics help justify an investment in power management?
Perrotta: Not only do you get protection and an understanding of what the power problems are, you also get an understanding of your energy profile, so when you talk about power management and energy efficiency as a dealer coming into to sell equipment that is supposed to be more energy efficient, you can prove it. ‘My devices are 50 percent more energy efficient than my competitors.’ That’s all well and good to show them a piece of paper and a spec, but what if you can prove that to them?
‘When the copier/MFP is in rest position it’s using less power than my competitor. When it’s printing jobs, it’s consuming less power.’ Those things have an immediate effect on being to convince a customer that what you’re selling them has a basis to it.
How can ESP help dealers be successful at selling power protection?
Perrotta: We’ve done extensive testing on the effects of power protection and have participated in a number of studies and can show them relevant data. We have a lot of comparative data with BEI Services because we have many of the same customers. They’ve done studies that encompass tens of thousands of machines so the variable of power protection can be brought to the surface.
It’s difficult with small studies of 50 machines to say that power protection made a difference. It might actually show a big difference in the performance of the equipment, but I wouldn’t say that was a valid statistical study because there are so many variables that could have contributed to that. As much as I would like to say, yeah, we’re great. You need a large population of equipment to get a valid subset.
We have that data and have done those studies to show a ROI on the equipment having it versus not and we’ve done that with BEI Services on two different occasions. Both came to the same conclusion and it was even better in the latest study with a $205 estimated ROI per machine per year for equipment that used power protection versus those that didn’t.
Do you have anything new coming out this year that you’re excited about and your resellers should be excited about?
Perrotta: We introduced our enVision PCS power conditioning system in February. That combines an advanced level of diagnostics in terms of helping technicians diagnose power problems and [identifies] what those problems actually are. There’s nothing better than being able to isolate a problem for a customer, especially before it starts, but when it does happen, to be able to show the customer this is what’s happening in your facility.
An electrical problem is not something the tech will be able to take care of, but he can speak intelligently about it and show the customer data that they can take to a qualified electrician. It lifts the level of service and saves the technician time in diagnosing a real problem versus a power problem.
It also incorporates energy diagnostics in that it also monitors energy consumption so the same device can also give him a picture of the energy use of a piece of equipment. With the enVision product you can generate monthly reports on how much energy that piece of equipment used in a given month or a given quarter, what the energy profile looked like, and here’s what happened from a power anomalies standpoint.
