We continue our three part series on Managed Print Services: the Theory, the Tools, and the Targets. Today we will focus upon the tools at a dealers disposal.

Managed Print Services, or MPS as it is referred to, is as much art as it is science. As of yet, customers do not fully understand it, and the scary thing is that there are very few solutions providers that do either. Moreover, we will discuss some of the pro’s and con’s present in the vendor, partner, and consultant spaces today.

With over 4.6 trillion pages printed per year by U.S. offices alone (source), pundits and neophytes alike believe MPS to be the next ‘big thing’. Dealers are pinning their hopes that MPS success will restore gross profit to the balance sheet in an industry marked with year over year declines in margins.

The Consultants:

Is it snake-oil or success their selling? Truth be told these folks are the proverbial sales person’s sales person. Each has their varying techniques and slick talk-tracks, but the consultant selling MPS is a special breed, indeed. At present there are only a handful whose names are synonymous in the industry with MPS.

To be entirely fair, consultants - well, savvy consultants - listen to the desires of their clients. As such, I have the impression their customer bases are clamoring for advice on how to rollout MPS strategies. However, I’m not entirely sure if most of the hype is fueled by the consultation industry, the manufacturers or the dealers.

As a customer of these consultants, a dealer principal must be aware of reputation and a proven track record. The consultant is selling knowledge and observations accumulated through working with other dealers - so you are essentially paying for the distilled do’s and do not’s.

Be careful here because the rubber only meets the road if you are willing to understand the concepts and theories behind selling MPS, as well as adapt those theories to 1) your culture and 2) your marketplace. Without this willingness to commit, you are dead before you leave the gate.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The Programs:

I have been contacted by just about every company out there trying to sell me and my company the essential toolkit to tackle MPS.

1. Manufactures and Value-Added Resellers (VARs) try to push their angle so you will sell more of their product.
2. Software companies try to sell you the analysis and sales training necessary to win the assessment and place your desired hardware.
3. Toner manufactures are either underwriting some program through co-op funding or outright selling their solution to help you sell their toner.
4. … and even the consultants have their favorites.

While this is all natural here is what you have to remember when thinking about doing business with one or many of these types of providers:

1. Be honest with what kind of company and culture you have: Can  you sell applications or are you slinging boxes?
2. Have a vision of where you want to be in 5 years: This is not a short hitch if you are to make money.
3. Know whether you want a franchise or a steakhouse: Do you want the whole package gift wrapped and put in your lap or are you willing to build a quality organization?
4. What returns and resources can your providers provide and promise?
5. Talk to references you trust before the handshake.

Have the right tools for the job at hand.

The Software:

The software centered around MPS comes in 2 distinct flavors these days: sales data gathering/fleet management and proposal generation/total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis.

First, the data gathering tools are a critical piece of the much talked-around document assessment or print management study. These come in various flavors from a small USB key that quickly captures an inventory and equipment volume count to the much more elaborate full deployment model of server and client based assessment packages.

The fleet management tools are quickly becoming essential to cost-effectively maintain the growing number of fleets. There is a land grab under place in this industry, and every vector is angling to find a way to protect their core business by rolling out fleet management strategies. Your choice in partners here will dictate long-term success or failure as consolidation in this space is inevitable.

Second, The sales proposal generation and TCO analysis tools come in a variety of flavors. Most work well for their intended purposes, but I will share with you from personal experience that the main obstacle is your account management team’s resistance to adopt a different working pattern.

While all of these are valuable in various instances, the critical mistake you should make is that the software tools will magically show you the path to enlightenment and how to make an obscene amount of money while saving the customer 70% of their operating costs in the next 6 months. They won’t.

Imagine the document assessment being the surveying and architectural process, whereby the outocome is to build a house of strategy for your customer. In essence, these tools simply frame windows in the customer’s house. It is up to your account management team to determine how the house should best be furnished in accordance with the customer’s strategic desires and needs.

The Resources:

Having trusted resources is important, for dealer and customer alike. Outside of finding those industry colleagues you can bug and consultants have to pay, there are a few resources online to help with Managed Print Services. Additionally, if you sign-up with various MPS providers, you should ensure their information is relevant and can be used for both internal sales awareness as well as sales literature for your customer base.

Past this, there are some other resources like Gartner and Photizo Group that can useful in attempting to compile information. Additionally, various industry organizations like IBPI, BTA, and CDA can be of service if you are a member.

Opportunity Abounds but Success can be Elusive:

True success is hard to come by in the MPS space. The competition is coming at you from everywhere:

• Manufacturers, VARs, the Internet, and even the two-man operation down the street can compete.
• Margins are extremely thin on supplies if you do not have the proper relationships or partnership-levels established.
• Customers are becoming more educated with each successive generation of renewals.

The success of your company can depend on whether you embrace this fleet-centric (and almost device agnostic) opportunity as a core component of your mainstay business. With over 4.6 trillion pages being printed by U.S. companies alone, only an estimated 3% are considered covered by a fleet management strategy.

Opportunities abound, but make no mistake about it, there is a land grab going on and if you don’t position properly you’ll be left out in the wind without a stake in the ground.

Up Next: We discuss what targets are popular and which are profit-suckers.

Update: Greg over at Death of the Copier wrote two great follow-up articles to some crucial tools I had misclassified - The Interview and The Six Inches

Update: Read the entire series.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Today we start our three part series on Managed Print Services: the Theory, the Tools, and the Targets.

Managed Print Services, or MPS as it is referred to, is as much art as it is science. As of yet, customers do not fully understand it, and the scary thing is that there are very few solutions providers that do either.

According to pundits and neophytes alike, MPS has garnered a special place among those in the output industry. Everyone hails it as the next ‘big thing’ that will yield buckets full of money in an industry marked with year over year declines in margins.

Indeed, properly managed right-sizing initiatives can be very profitable and save a customer a good deal of money over alternatives. How can someone deliver on revenue for one while showing savings for another?

Let us examine some of the theory behind why a company would venture into review of MPS in the first place.

1. The traditional copier fleet has found its way on to the wire and the space for document output has become crowded in a “me-too” frenzy of ’speeds and feeds’ (and industry term used to describe a cost-minus sales approach).
2. There is a huge collision between the space of the traditional copier/mfp manufacturers of the world (Xerox, Canon, Sharp, Ricoh, Konica, Kyocera, etc.) and the printer manufacturers of the world (HP, Lexmark, etc.).

Given these dynamics and the complexity of these devices’ feature sets, more and more often IT is being asked to manage the device fleet. And what does IT do better than almost any other organization within the business - identify and implement processes through standardization.

…stud[ies] shows that decision making for MPS agreements is driven by the IT organization over 60% of the time. In many cases, the traditional copier decision makers (purchasing, facilities management, and operations) are ‘losing out’ in the internal struggle to control the hard copy device fleet (the collective group of copiers, printers, and MFP’s which reside in most organizations). - Ed Crowley, CEO of The Photizo Group

Savvy “copier dealers” and “printing VARs” alike are rushing headlong into their version of MPS - trying to put their spin, trying to evangelize customers, trying to win the land grab!

What makes a sound partner yesterday still makes a sound partner today:

Managing printers is not a new thing. IT has been doing it for decades now - and HP has been helping customers do it some fashion or another. The trend now is to right-size your fleet of output devices and lower operating costs across the board.

Many statistics point to the majority of document costs being in the related costs area - not in the fleet acquisition or actual realization of the document on the output device. One big area network administrators can speak to is the rampant number of calls they receive on printing related issues, for instance. I know I can.

With trends in outsourcing over the last decade, CFO’s and CIO’s alike are looking for ways to help their balance sheet. Does offloading an unattractive portion of the P&L to a strategic partner make sense? Couple this with the ability to refresh the technology, control your costs, and  throw in an economic downturn, now you have a boiling pot of water ready for the chef. It’s what they call a classic ‘win-win’.

Strategy not tragedy:

However, many customers remain uneducated on what they are spending and what a properly equipped partner can bring to the table.

As with any opportunity there are many “fly-by-night” operations, and it behooves the client to educate themselves on options, and just what their prospective partner’s definition of MPS actually is. As they say, “The Devil is in the details.”

Customers can avoid many unpleasant situations by simply reading the contract and asking pointed questions. Crowley also points out that many organizations go through phases of learning what they want, so there appears to be some education in the negotiations as well:

Another finding from the study relates to how the components of MPS contracts tend to change as decision makers gain more experience. This is driven by changing expectations as decision makers gain experience with MPS and begin to raise their expectations beyond simply gaining control of the fleet to actually optimizing the fleet, and eventually, enhancing the firm’s business processes by adding new fleet and document management / workflow capabilities.

With all of that said, a blossoming opportunity remains on the forefront of both vendor and customer alike.

Up Next: we discuss the various software tools used in helping companies manage their fleets.

Update: Read the entire series.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.