This month’s State of the Industry focus on the product audible—dealers tapping into new revenue streams through the addition of products and services—shines a spotlight on the larger question that many pundits, analysts and trade media have been asking for months during the pandemic. Has the office landscape been permanently changed by COVID-19?
Certainly, the declining print volume topic is almost as old as the global warming conversation—a long lead-up to a potentially massive shift. And as distancing guidelines recede and on-premise business resumes in many of the nation’s major metropolitan centers in the coming months, the industry will be able to begin gauging exactly how much erosion has been caused by the work-from-home movement.
So, when we start the post-COVID-19 clock around mid-year or perhaps by the end of summer, what results will the ensuing 12 months produce? Will the rate of decline continue, or will the office settle into a “new normal” subject to future changes in the environment? We queried our dealer panel on the very subject.
“It is anyone’s guess, but I believe this pandemic drove a paradigm shift to electronic and cloud-based communications that will never completely return to the office as we know it,” stated Brian Gertler, senior vice president of LDI Color ToolBox in Jericho, New York. “And I think that is OK, as long as we are mindful of evolving with emerging technologies.”
Mark DeNicola, CFO/CSO of Centriworks in Knoxville, Tennessee, is of the mind that each dealer’s sales footprint and the pandemic’s impact on that footprint will bring to light the longevity and depth of business-altering trends. In the dealer’s East Tennessee back yard, DeNicola notes the political climate has produced a “laissez-faire reaction.” A lion’s share of businesses, which the exception of hospitality, public institutions and entertainment, had returned employees on-site to some degree by July.
“We had a significant drop in retail print volumes from April through September but are now back to 85% of pre-pandemic retail levels,” DeNicola noted. “We were fortunate that we had many of our major clients on flat-rate programs, so service revenues were not affected by the shelter-at-home orders and our margins on those accounts were drastically higher. To meet the work-at-home staff demand, we developed our Office in a Box and Office in the Cloud services.”
Positive Signs
With a number of industries already returning their employees to the office, John Lowery is confident volume levels will return on the back end of the pandemic based on the trends he’s seeing. The president of Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Applied Imaging got out in front of the pandemic with desktop printers, IT endpoints, secure shredding bags and increased ECM software and remote connectivity tool placements for the at-home environment.
“Once schools are back in session, they will resume printing as well,” Lowery added. “We accounted for that at the beginning of the pandemic and that’s why we made tweaks to our lineup to accommodate everybody. Mobile working and work from home have always existed, just not to this scale. It has helped us to encourage companies that there is still a way to resume business as usual when working from home with our technology.”
While the journey back to the office may be longer than most dealers would prefer, Brad Knepper—president of Denver-based All Copy Products—believes the work-from-home movement has its place, but ultimately, the office environment will largely resemble its former self. But the trend from A3 to A4, he says, will continue.
“That’s OK because we’re still getting the prints,” Knepper remarked. “Print volume was declining between 1% and 4% before, and the pandemic may have accelerated that by two or three years. But I think it will plateau a bit and continue to decline at a similar rate. That’s why we’re diversifying into these other areas.”
