Lexington, KY (Oct. 11, 2017) — Virtulytix, an Industrial IoT development firm, has announced a Software as a Solution (SaaS) based product to address a long-standing problem for the office products industry. Within the office products industry, the loss of toner due to early cartridge replacement has been a not-so-well-kept secret which costs fleet managers (dealers, resellers and OEMs) over $50 device per year. For an individual dealer who manages thousands of devices, this cost quickly adds up. This problem costs the industry as a whole over $750 million each year in the cost of wasted toner and additional shipping.
According to Scott Hornbuckle, president of Virtulytix, “We are utilizing predictive and prescriptive analytics tools to develop a ‘pay for use’ solution for dealers to determine when the cartridge will be empty and thus avoid early replacement of cartridges. Our field testing has shown that we can reduce this waste by up to 80%, resulting in significant savings for dealers.”
Virtulytix’s solution captures data from the fleet management software the dealer is currently using, processes the data in a secure private cloud, and then provides the outputs directly to the dealer’s ERP system, or in the form of dashboards or secure notifications. The cost savings associated with this model are significant, even when compared to existing toner saving approaches such as linear regression algorithms, in fact, it can be twice as large.
The first implementation of this tool was developed for use with the PrintFleet fleet management software, additional connectors can be provided for other major fleet management tools.
In order to make it easy for dealers to receive the benefit of SuppliesIQ, Virtulytix is providing a one-month free trial. If the dealer is satisfied with the results, they can sign up for an annual subscription. In order to help dealers understand how much this tool can save them, Virtulytix has an Impact Calculator tool which is available here.
According to Ed Crowley, CEO of Virtulytix, “The office products equipment market is one of the largest existing industrial IoT markets with over 100 million, digitally enabled, connected devices installed worldwide. Over 15 million of these devices are actively managed under some type of pay for use or cost per page service agreement. By introducing this solution we are providing our clients with a way to significantly improve the profitability and efficiency of their fleet management operations.”
The SuppliesIQ solution and free trial are available now to dealers, resellers and OEMs.
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About Virtulytix
Virtulytix provides advanced analytics solutions which enable industrial IoT device manufacturers and fleet managers to realize the full potential of their IoT enabled devices and fleets. Virtulytix develops solutions using IBM Watson Cognitive tools, Tableau, Python, and other advanced analytics technologies. The firm’s team of project managers, data engineers, and data scientists help clients reduce service costs, minimize replenishable item wastage, and avoid unplanned maintenance for industrial IoT enabled products by developing predictive and prescriptive analytics-based solutions. The company’s clients include energy companies, semiconductor firms, and office equipment manufacturers. Virtulytix also provides market intelligence and consulting to the office equipment industry.
