The Transition of the Copier Industry "Part 2"

Part #2

When digital copiers first arrived on the scene, we were all happy that copiers were now capable of network printing, network scanning and faxing. In the early days the biggest benefit to the end users was that if the copier jammed (and they all did), during a copy or print job, you would be able to clear the jam, then reset the system and the copier remembered what page was not copied or printed and you would be able to continue with the job.  When this happened with analog systems you pretty much had to trash the entire copy job and start all over, what a drag that was especially if it happened with a demonstration.

For those of us that were in the industry with the emergence of digital copiers we saw the benefit of having one system that would replace three systems, the existing analog copier, the printer and the fax machine.  The cost per page of fax machines and stand alone printers always and still have a higher cost per page.  I can remember in the late nineties compiling my own cost per analysis for each device and it wasn't easy.  You had to access specs from brochures, get cartridge prices and yields from industry published copier, printer and fax spec check books.  It was an easy sale when you could present an immediate ROI for most customers to replace three systems with one. Traditionally analog copiers and digital copiers always had a lower cost per page than laser printers and fax machines. I'm thinking copier dealers started the managed print/copy trend by offering an all inclusive cost per page contracts with the digital systems and we didn't even know it.

We did have our issues!  We were copier service and sales companies now trying to offer support and solutions for print/fax and scan environments.  Many of the early network copies never printed as fast as they were advertised, print drivers were awkward and it seemed we always had some type of issues with installing print drivers, and addressing print issues. But, we moved forward as an industry with improved technology from the manufacturers and other third party suppliers.  I believe the service model for copiers and the planned obsolescence of supplies and parts always kept us in tune and in front of the customer.

At sometime in the late nineties and early 2,000's we started to see third party hardware and software solutions from companies like eCopy, and Equitrac. I'm sure there were more however I can't remember any of the other players.  Companies like Ecopy and Equitrac allowed copier dealers to move into selling software, supporting software and also presented opportunities for professional services. Within a few years there were many other companies that emerged with additional solutions.  All of these third party providers added value to the digital copier.  Thus salespeople had more opportunities to sell solutions in many different vertical markets and larger companies as well.  The once ridiculed copier that took the butt of all the office jokes emerged as the central hub in the office for processing information on paper.

The digital copier industry of today is changing again and companies like Xerox, Ricoh, KonicaMinolta and Canon are making the transition to service led companies. These companies will be the sole provider for documents whether they are created electronically or printed, they want to help customers with print stream management, forms, email, archiving of documents (electronic and paper), they also want to provide consulting to help businesses increase efficiencies, provide easier work flows and reduce your costs.

more to come with Part 3

-=Good Selling=-

Copier Dealerships Use of Tablet Technology Saves the Day!

Rick Backus is a genuine genius when it comes to implementing time saving solutions for Copier & Managed Print Dealers.  We're also proud to have Rick as a member and sponsor of the Print4Pay Hotel forums, many times Rick has stepped up and offered a solution when most of thought there was not one.  This blog from Rick is a great example of how Rick's knowledge and expertise can help your company improve it's business processes.

Support revenue using mobile devices to capture signatures and data from the field

One of my clients was recently looking to refresh their field service technician's hardware and was considering whether they might be able to roll out tablets rather than upgrade the existing laptops.

Essentially the techs only needed storage for technical and part manuals, Internet access and email for communication. Tablets are certainly capable of fulfilling these requirements and are considerably less expensive which is always a powerful motivator.

During this same time period another dilemma was confronting the service department. They were losing a significant amount of revenue from chargeable, time and material calls where the customer was disputing the invoice and service could not produce a signed copy of the service call report to substantiate their invoice to the customer. It seems the existing procedure for processing the call reports no tracking ability to insure the techs a) Actually filled out and returned a signed copy of the report and b) once it was returned that it was properly filed and retrievable.

Many months ago I had setup a SharePoint site for them for a sales related project but at the time we also created a document library to scan date-batched service call reports to for archiving. You know, eliminate the paper and all... Well this process fell by the wayside and the department was losing revenue. A new solution was desperately needed.

Electronic forms would foot the bill but since they were using SharePoint Foundation they did not have access to InfoPath forms. After some research and testing on our in-house SharePoint Enterprise instance we came up with a solution to the problem. With a new mail-enabled, document library in the service department's sub-site we installed a new application to create electronic PDF forms. Using the original pdf file from the paper version as an underlay we inserted all the necessary data fields in the form including mapping specific fields to document library columns as metadata. The parts sales prices and final totals were setup to automatically calculate as well.

After some testing and training we rolled the solution out to the techs. It was a tremendous success. They have nearly 100% compliance, the completed forms are emailed back to the SharePoint document library and indexed automatically. Using views and/or filtering we can identify the chargeable reports, compare form count to tech closed calls as a cross check and we have all the customers emails for marketing purposes. The customers are impressed by the use of technology including using their finger to sign the forms which are emailed to them immediately. It was a huge win all the way around.

This technology opened up a whole variety of other opportunities with this client. The next step is to tackle the delivery and acceptance forms.

If this is something you think your organization could benefit from contact me here.

-=Good Selling=-


 

Servicing Copiers & MFP's "Retain Customers with Excellent Service"

I started in the industry as a copier technician, well kinda. After 90 days I had a review and the owner of the company told me I did a great job at taking the machines apart, however not so good a job at putting them back together. Thus was the beginning of my sales career.

But I'd like to talk more about the guys and gals that keep the copier systems running for me.

These are the service engineers that have to be polite and hear comments like "Oh, the copiers broken again", or "You're here so much we might as well put you on the payroll", "You're here again" as they walk past you snickering. Being a copier Service Engineer is not a glamour job, but you do get the chance to be out of the office and some of the systems will pose a challenge and I guess there is a reward when you fix the system and it's your expertise that enables the system to run well.

I for one can appreciate how hard they work and what they have to put up with on a daily basis. They have to deal with some unpleasant customers at times, field questions from sales people (yeah they call us the dummies), make sure the correct parts are ordered, follow up, diagnose issues, manage calls and answer to the Service Manager, plus do six or seven calls a day, while always being on the road (that's a chore in itself). Some Service Engineers are now even tracked by GPS, so the company knows where they are at all times. Oh, thank goodness I'm not being tracked!!

The Service Engineers (I hate calling them techs) that service the systems in my territory are great. They are great to the customers, and they are extremely knowledgeable in their field. Lets face it after the machine is sold, who sees the customer more often that the technicians. I have a team that will bend over backwards to keep our customers satisfied! Customers will perceive your company by the expertise and professionalism your Service Engineers.

My guys are always watching my back, and keeping tabs on the customer and informing me if some customers maybe having some difficult issues.
So, if you're a Service Engineer in the copier business, my hats off to you. You guys and gals have to deal with a lot of stuff, while still maintaining your composure and professionalism. Those of us in sales would not be able to get repeat sales if it weren't for you.

Here's one of my favorites for copier repairs reads (I pretty sure it was posted on the Print4Pay Hotel forums:

When the office photo-copies began to look faint, the office manager had the receptionist call in a local repair service.

The friendly technician, after inspecting the equipment, informed the receptionist that the machine was only in need of a good cleaning. The copier tech suggested that someone might try just reading the operator's manual and perform the job themselves, since it would cost much if he did the work.

The receptionist said she would relay this info back to the office manager, but she was truly surprised by his candor so she asks, "Does your boss know you are discouraging business?"

"Actually, my boss demands we explain this to all our customers," he replies to the receptionist. With a wink he adds, " Anyway, after people try first to fix things themselves, we end-up making much more money on repairs."

-=Good Servicing & Selling=-

Top Ten Favorite Copier Moments!

We started this topic on the Print4Pay Hotel forums a few months ago and I thought I'd share some of the threads that were posted for everyone.

Check out the YouTube video on the left it's pretty good also!

If you'd like to add your own go to this link and register to be a member, don't worry it's FREE!

"Several years back, I installed a fleet of Gestetner 60ppm MFP's in a large private school in DFW. The day after they were installed, a teacher decided to make transparencies (this was only 6 years ago, but they still used them) on the new machine. She made the mistake of grabbing transparencies that were not approved for use on a high-speed copier and proceeded to melt several transparencies onto the fusing unit. Not realizing what happened, she just thought the new machine was broken. So, why not try another machine down the hall. Obviously, the same result. This infuriated our VP of Service who started threatening to bill them for (2) new fusing units as part of the "User abuse" clause of their contract. The bill would've been nearly $2,000. The service technician who received the calls visited the machines and upon confirming that the transparencies had melted onto the fusing units, he abruptly left and grabbed several cans of compressed air from the Staples down the street. When he returned, he sprayed the compressed air onto the fusing units and dropped them on the floor, at which point the transparencies shattered into pieces on the floor & put the fusers back into the machines. They ran perfectly. He's basically a legend on that campus now." by TXEAGLE

"Years ago had a Lawyer come into our warehouse all angry yelling that her Fax machine we just sold her did not work at all.

So we took the fax back to product support and did some testing and could not find anything wrong with it.

After listening to her rant about documents not being sent we kindly asked her to come back to demonstrate what she was seeing as an error.

She takes a sheet of paper fed it in, dialed the test number, hit send, and started yelling

"See the paper just spits back out!"

"that piece of paper is not going anywhere!"

We had to explain to her that a Fax only transfers the image not the actual piece of paper."  by YETI


I was doing a demo when the newer bottles came out it was on a 22 cpm. Open the door and pulled the bottle and flipped it upside down and said look no more spilled toner and looked to see I was pouring toner on their new carpet.The top was still in the chuck.

The funniest one I ever heard was told to be by a technician it was in the mid 80's he dumped the developer out a customers machine and did not have a bag to put it in, so he went into the rest room and put it in the commode, but when he flushed it just spun around in the bowl. He flushed so many time the customer started knocking the door asking if he was ok and needed any help." by Aficio 400

If you'd like to read the others then click here and if you'd like to learn more about the Print4Pay Hotel, then click here.

-=Good Selling=-

Copiers, MFPs and "The Power of the .001 (one thousands of a penny)"

The Power of the .001 (one thousands of a penny)

It's getting kind of late but thought I'd give a stab at this.  The lowly penny and the power of profit that can be collected from Copiers, Printers and MFP's that are under maintenance contract is astounding.  

Years ago, with out the aid of copier maintenance software it was interesting to see what machines were pulling a profit and which were not.  When I was a newbie in the industry I can remember the service manager coming to me with a service card that outlined the cost that incurred with "x" machine and he had to make the call either try and get the system out of the field (thanx for the lead, just what I wanted to deal with a customer whose machine was breaking all the time) or to lose money on the system and raise the maintenance contract next year.

Today, maintenance software to monitor and track profits is now the norm for all dealers and manufacturers.  Thus with low profit systems or those systems producing a loss can be identified ASAP and measures can be put in place to make the system profitable.  The easiest way to make them profitable is to raise the cost of the maintenance agreement.  Most maintenance agreements sold now are all inclusive, meaning all parts, PM kits, consumables (toner, developer) and labor are included. Thus the cost per copy (I call it the cost per page) now rules the industry for most contracts.

So, what the heck does a penny get you?  Not much anymore, can you add a penny per page to a cost per page program, well you can if you 'd like to lose customers!

Here's some quick calculations on the power of the penny or in this case .001 (one thousands of a penny).  We'll deal with assumptions here for easy math.

XYZ Dealership has 500 systems that are on a cost per page contract. Each system generates 5,000 pages per month on average for a total of 2.5 million pages per month.  The XYZ dealership needs to generate additional profit because the owner needs a new boat. By adding .001 to each renewing contract each month, the added profit is $2,500 per month. Over the course of a year that's $30,000.  That's enough for the boat payments!  Really, if your current contract cost was .01 (penny) would you (the customer) be upset if the monthly increase was .001(one thousands of a penny) = $5 per month (Don't think so). What about an increase of .002 for each page, well now we're talking $5,000 per month and gee the owner can get an even bigger BOAT!

Now, here's some really crazy numbers for you.  The XYZ Dealership has 3,000 systems that are under a cost per page contract and each machine averages 10,000 pages per month.  The average monthly page volume is 30 million pages!  Adding just .001(one thousands of a penny) per page will give a profit of $30,000 dollars per month and a cool $360,000 dollars for the year. Now we're talking about a really really big boat!

Can the 3,000 systems averaging 10,000 pages a month be achieved, you betcha, it may take awhile but the opportunities are there especially with the emergence of managed print services in the last few years. 

Most profits from dealers go right back into the company, higher wages, additional people, new technology, cost of living.  I just thought it was neat run the numbers and see where they came out and have some fun!!

-=Good Selling=-

Copier Video "One of my Favs"

Tonight I was putting the final touches on the P4P Video Channel and ran across this vide from Spin City. I thought I'd seen all of the episodes and can't figure out how I missed this one about the copier. Enjoy!


Spin City Copier Sex




-=Good Selling=-

Copiers, Laser Printers & Your Health!

I've heard about this report before and had heard all of the critics, however it seems that this is not going away. Some have referred to it's th same as inhaling "burnt toast". Well, I don't inhale burnt toast everyday, however I'm sure there are many technicians that inhale this stuff everyday.

My main concern is that if this stands to be true, what do we do with the millions upon millions of copy machines. Let's face it, the copy machines of today are nothing more than heavy duty laser printers!

Has anyone noticed and increase in copier or laser printers technicians with cardiovascular disease? Is this even tracked? Is there really a problem here?

The post below is from Osko News

"Almost every third laser printer emits a large number of ultrathin harmful particles, which have a negative effect on the cardiovascular system. This is illustrated by Australian scientists.

According to the author of the study from University of Queensland Lydia Morosku, danger comes primarily during the printing process, when the coloring of the heat comes from paper.

“This end-product of chemical reaction is comparable with the clouds of smoke or automobile exhaust gases, which are potentially hazardous to human health - stressed Morosku - Thus, by inhaling a “bouquet”, the owner of a laser printer inadvertently cause irritation of the respiratory system, which subsequently develops in cardiovascular disease “.

Professor also recommended clerical related to office equipment, keep the laser printers as far as possible from their jobs and ensure that vehicles are well ventilated. It should be remembered more than the printer is operating, the higher the concentration of harmful particles, said AMI-TASS."

-=Good Selling=- I hope!! Here's a cool Xerox file for you

Copier Technicians "Truth Be Told"

I started in the industry as a copier technician. Who's always there to listen to those mundane comments, "Oh, the copiers broken again", or "You're here so much we might as well put you on the payroll", "You're here again" as they walk past you snickering. Being a copier technician is not a glamour job and the pay from what I here is so, so. I've also heard that 65% of copier techs don't like their jobs.

I for one can appreciate how hard they work and what they have to put up with on a daily basis. They have to deal with some unpleasant customers at times, field questions from sales people (yeah they call us the dummies), make sure the correct parts are ordered, follow up, diagnose issues, manage calls and answer to the Service Manager, plus do six or seven calls a day, while always being on the road (that's a chore in itself). The techs that service the systems in my territory are great. They are great to the customers, and they are extremely knowledgeable in their field. Lets face it after the machine is sold, who sees the customer more often that the technicians. I have a team that will bend over backwards to keep our customers satisfied! Customers will perceive your company by the expertise and professionalism of the technicians.

My guys are always watching my back, and keeping tabs on the customer and informing me if some customers maybe having some difficult issues.

So, if you're a tech in the copier business, my hats off to you. You guys have to deal with a lot of stuff, while still maintaining your composure and professionalism. Those of us in sales would not be able to get repeat sales if it weren't for you guys.

Here's one of my favorites for copier repairs:

When the office photo-copies began to look faint, the office manager had the receptionist call in a local repair service.

The friendly technician, after inspecting the equipment, informed the receptionist that the machine was only in need of a good cleaning. The copier tech suggested that someone might try just reading the operator's manual and perform the job themselves, since it would cost much if he did the work.

The recptionist said she would relay this info back to the office manager, but she was truly surprised by his candor so she asks, "Does your boss know you are discouraging business?"
"Actually, my boss demands we explain this to all our customers," he replies to the receptionist. With a wink he adds, " Anyway, after people try first to fix things themselves, we end-up making much more money on repairs."

-=Good Servicing=-

Top Ten MFP "Predictions for 2009"

Here's my top ten for 2009, believe it not, I do not think there will be anymore acquisitions by the big boys.

1. Canon and HP will develop a cross marketing venture.

2. Introduction of the first printer centric A4 90ppm system or faster.

3. Panasonic will drop out of the MFP businesss.

4. Canon Business Systems USA will open direct branches to compete with Ikon.

5. Ricoh will spend less on R & D due to increased debt.

6. Independent dealerships merges will be the new FAD.

7. A new holding company will emerge to acquire copier dealerships, in essence a renewal of IKON, Danka and Global.

8. HP will start buying Dealers in key market areas.

9 Printer Management will increase in popularity, thus starting the trend for reps to be paid on clicks and not boxes.

10. Copier Technicians will unionize.

-=Good Selling=-

Ode to the Copier Repairman

I can't take credit for this, this was reposted on the Print4PayHotels Ricoh Family Group Message Boards today. It is a good read. Enjoy!

An Ode to the Copier Repairman Of all the heroes great and small;comes he, the most unsung of all.

You've seen him before, you know him well;

he comes to do battle with the copier from Hell.

He steps through your door, a glaze in his eye,a tool kit in hand, and toner on his tie.

The problems, oh yes, he's seen them all, this week;the jams, the rattles, the chortles, the squeaks.

The customer tells him "It's broke, see, right there!"As slowly he pulls out what's left of his hair."Okay," says he, "I'll have it fixed in a snap!

"The office manager replies, "It's a piece of crap!

"The insults bounce off, he's heard them before;

The same stale old wisecracks, a million times more.

He opens a panel, flips a lever, turns a screw;

Meanwhile the damn thing takes a leak on his shoe.

The consummate professional he's trained to be;but respect?

Hell, he gets less than Rodney D.

The copies are streaked, too light, or too dark;

the last time it was serviced was on Noah's Ark.

He's got it running, now, cleared the jams, stopped the drips,removed from its insides seven pounds of paper clips.

His hands are shredded, and he's covered with grime;

some wiseguy walks by, "Didja fix it this time?"

He smiles as he cleans the covers and mirrors,tries his best to ignore people's insults and sneers;

takes some comfort in knowing five 0' clock's getting close.

Of filth, slime, and insults, he's had his daily dose.

So when your copier hiccups, and threatens to die,Please be kind to your Repairman, with toner on his tie.