Sunday, April 1, 2012

2 Cents for Color MFP Cost Per Page/Coverage Meter

About a month ago we had a report from Monte Jensen (Premium P4P Hotel Member) that stated that the new Kyocera Color MFP’s were now capable of customizing the meter for page coverage.  Selling Copiers & MFP's "Color Cost Page for 2 Cents" It seems this being kept on the down low especially since I couldn’t find out anything on the Kyocera USA web site.

Monte is back as or guest blogger with some additional information about the customizable meter, I’ve also posted the links for the documents and they’re being kept in the Documents Forum on the Print4Pay Hotel. You can download here. 

I now understand the 2 cent color offering much more.
Every Kyocera Taskafa product now has 3 meters. The first meter is black, the second meter is full color and the third meter is customizable.
We have customized it so that any document with less than 6% cyan magenta yellow bill will click that meter. This is regardless of black fill.
The attached document first page is a printout from the MFP. It is a report of the last page printed. As you can see black was 5.24% and add cyan, magenta and yellow together is 4.41%. This is a report based on the document or page 2. Another words we printed page 2 and page 1 is the coverage result.
We are now gathering customers documents and printing them and getting reports. If a customer is printing a repetitive document such as letterhead we can do a quick analysis of it and advise them if it falls into 6% threshold. We see this is a real game changer and have already beaten our competition many times with this lockout.
As a dealer we are concerned that we are lowering our service margins. In the past when we would charge eight cents for the same document our margin was much greater. If we do not increase our volume of equipment sales or print volume then we will have lowered our profit.
Meters are automatically collected using a tool called pagetrac developed by LMI solutions. This utility is installed on a customer’s network either on a client or server and e-mails meter reads to us. However if the customer changes something on the network pagetrac may malfunction and we will need to reinstall.
Me:  Monte brings out a good point about the concern of lowering their page margin.  However I tend to think that you could also increase your margin by having a cost for color that is over 20%, this could make up the difference or even add additional revenue in some cases.
Will this become the norm in the industry? 

-=Good Selling=-

2 comments:

GreggT said...

Is this smoke-n-mirrors?
So we're simply lowering the color toner saturation here??
It's pretty common knowledge the color toner coefficient on color-capable MFPs is less than 50% of the tot. CPI. Unless the OEM has found a way to charge the photoconductor less, not turn the fuser rollers as much, cut my labor burden rate in half, etc, etc, etc.....I don't think I'd take this one to the bank quite yet. Just one opin here. GreggT

Chuck O said...

This not how the three meter color option works for Kyocera. You enable three meter color in the service mode. It measures percentage of CMY laid down individually and is calculated and printed out for the last page scanned in the service status page. It gives you the percentage of each, C,M,Y. Black is not factored into the color calculations. You then set the values in each level, 1,2,and 3 is anything above 2. For example, you scan a document with minimal color and then print out the service status page, it reads C=.014, M=.016, Y=.025 total = .055 percent fill CMY. That is level 1. Then set threshold level 2 to your average CPP calculation of say 20%, anything above is level 3. You set your billing, agreed in the beginning with customer accordingly. My experience is 85% of color falls into level 2. You help the customer with minimal charge for minimal coverage but protect yourself when they exceed normal coverage. It works!