Weekend Copier & MFP Updates for 1/29/2012

Superbowl week is upon us GO GIANTS!!
For those who delve deep into the forums, there is so much awesome content from the p4p members.Please make sure you read all of the new links and then pick and choose what interests you! For those readers that are not members please use this one time lifetime FREE registration link!

Print4Pay Hotel's Production Print Certification Testing!  That's right now posted on P4P U Certifications & Testing are the first five tests in a total of ten tests. There will be a new test posted each month for the next five months!

Please take advantage of the sales documents, quotes, proposals, rfp's, rfq's, uploads, leads, p4p library, downloads and all of the additional forum features that are enabled with a Premium Membership!

Recent Blogs of NoteRicoh A4 MFP vs Canon A4 MFP "Who Wins with Scanning"?
Selling Copiers & MFP's "First Contact"
Selling Copiers & MFP's "The Tax Man Cometh"
Selling Copiers & MFP's "Where's the Hard Drives?"
I Want My....I Want My..... SMART MFP

Interesting & Most Viewed P4P Forum ThreadsITEX 2012 OFFERS COMPREHENSIVE DEALER EDUCATION INCLUDING
Winning Proposal Generator for MPF's or MPS
Ricoh SP 5200 Series A4imageRUNNER 1700 Series
New Units from Ricoh 1st quarter 2012
Keyboard for Ricoh MFP's
End of 2011 Sales Quota Poll
Global Imaging Systems Names...
Lexmark and Anheuser-Busch ink MPS deal

NEW! Uploaded MFP Docs in P4P Document Library5 Tips 4 Using the Web4Prospecting the “First Contact
Reduce_Costs_through_Printer_Consolidation
Multifunction-Printer-
Ricoh Staple cost analysis
Ricoh Black Laser Cost Per Page Yield Analysis

Press ReleasesKyocera Mita America Multifunctional Products and Printers Named ...
Océ Outlines Five Key Attributes to Consider When Purchasing a Wide Format ScannerXerox Reports 14% increase in EPS on Flat Revenue
Ricoh is one of the world’s most sustainable companies for the eighth year
Konica Minolta to Exhibit Award-Winning Solutions and IT Services at LegalTech

P4P Poll QuestionsNew Color Cost Per Page Poll for 60 ppm plus
New Color Cost Per Page Poll for 30-44 ppm COLOR
New Color Cost Per Page Poll for 45 - 59 ppm COLOR

New Leads, RFP's & RFQ's Uploaded!Need a Lease of 62 Copiers in......
Copiers Need for Fort ______ School District
Health Support Services Needs Color COpier
200K copier Bid in Meid West USA
3-Year Copier Lease

Uploaded Pricing Proposals & QuotesKyocera 3500 Quote
"Pricing on the Street" Canon 3245i
"Pricing on the Street" KonicaMinolta bizhub423
"Pricing on the Street" Xerox WorkCentre 5150PTQ.pdf
Ricoh Production Print Cost Per Page "Consumables" Analysis

-=Good Selling=-

Ricoh Innovates with Scan2iPhone & Scan2iPod App

I've had an iPod touch for awhile, but never had the chance to play around with it. Over the last week or so, I've been having some fun with all of the different apps and games. I'll have to admit I love some of the games but hate the fact that they give you the opportunity to pay for additional features. Whatever, the game cost .99 cents and I think I dumped $20 bucks or so on upgrades, kinda wish I had that opportunity with PACMAN when I use to sit at the bar for hours dumping quarters into the machine.

Anyway, I downloaded the app for Ricoh Innovations for scanning documents on my iPod touch and this will also work with the iphone, not sure about the new droid phones.

So, under some not so good light at my desk I used the app to scan some pages. It's easy!!! You open the Ricoh app, take the picture and you'll then have the opportunity to deskew the document, clean the document or keep as is. When you're done you can them export to all these Google docs, email, Evernote, Dropbox, or export to your picture gallery. When exporting to everything but your picture gallery you send as a .pdf or .jpeg.

Within a minute or less I had the document in my Google docs and then sent to my email account. One of the nice features that I noticed is that once the document is sent it's not deleted, this enables you to send the document to another if needed. It kinda almost felt James Bondish, being able to take a picture of the document and have it captured and secured with one of my accounts.

The image quality is good. Keep in mind that you can tap the screen of the iPod or iPhone and you'll be able to focus and then see the AE lock on the screen.  I did not have the chance to export as a jpeg to see that quality. Keep in mind it's more for documents, sketches and stuff like that. Once I opened the doc, of course it was readable, but the quality kinda reminded me of a poor quality fax (but, I then realized that the document I captured was printed via inkjet printer and it was taken from an image from the web, thus 72dpi). I printed the document to my printer and it printed exactly what I scanned.

I'm thinking a better quality document will produce much better results and I really didn't have the time to run out to the car to get some good originals nor did I want to print from the inkjet. When I'm back in the office I'll give this a shot with some clean documents.

So, I'm thinking this is an awesome app, especially for those of us in the field. Instead of using scan2email or faxing the documents to the office. I can take a picture of them and email them or upload to my Google docs (this way I always have a copy of the documents).

It's the sizzle that sells the steak right? I'll going to incorporate this app into my presentations, and I was just thinking a neat demonstration would be to have email2print setup at the office and then just email the scanned page to the MFP's email address. That would be the sizzle!

Dam, I couldn't wait till I got to the office so I went to the car and pulled a clean original and processed through the Ricoh app. You know it did a very good job, not A1 perfect, but good enough for FREE and good enough to read and process documents!!!

-=Good Selling=-

Weekend Copier & Multifunctional Print4Pay Hotel Notes 7/30/2011

My summer Collegiate Baseball season has ended, not a great year for the team record wise, however I'm always delighted being able to coach the game!

The end of July really, already!  It's been an ok year so far, I've already met my annual quota (our year ends in December), Presidents Club is in the bag and I'm going to try and focus on driving additional profit along with adding more potential accounts that have multiple units.  So, at least for now I'll be back to blogging on a regular basis!

So for all our Print4Pay Hotel Members and Members to be, here's some links of our latest and greatest threads. Check out the new beta portal here.

Recent Document Uploads:

"Pricing on th Street" for Xerox_Quote WC7755PC
"Pricing on the Street" for Lanier LDC 365C proposal
"Pricing on the Street" for IKON_Quote Ricoh MPc 6501
"Pricing on the Street" for Canon iR6075

There's many more, just the latest from today!

Leads, RFP's RFQ's:
Bid for 23 MFP's in Canada
Bid in Canada for two Print Production units
Request for Proposals for 2 Copiers in California
RFP for 3 Print Production Units in Richmond
Copier lead in New Hope, PA

Many more of these also!!!

Recent Interesting Threads from P4P'ers:
Rumor has it....(Xerox to Market MFP's through Global only?) 
Material Data Safety Calls to the Manufacturer

Cloud SAS (Software as a ServicePoll)
New Sharp End of lease HDD feature
Xerox marketing FREE 120PPM Copiers
List your favorite funny copier moments

MFP Cloud Threads:
UDOCX in hybrid environments
Print email from the cloud (Video)
Generic advantages and differences of UDOCX vs.in house installs

These are just some samples of the threads from this week alone!! The Print4Pay has over 2,300 world wide members that are dedicated Imaging Professionals. Take a trip here www.p4photel.com/eve (registration link, don't worry man, it's FREE) and become a part of the largest social group of Imaging Professionals in the work and the opportunity to discuss solutions, best practices, rumors, and make new friends in the industry (it's nice to have a secure forum that's not out there for the public, eh?)

-=Good Selling=-
Art Post
"One of the Top 40 Most Influential People in the Imaging Business"

10 Tips for a Successful MFP Walkthrough

Just yesterday this question "I'm searching for best questions to ask on a walk through. New to the industry and would welcome your input." was posted on the Print4Pay Hotel forums.

I thought it would be a good topic for everyone.

Emie (Louisiana) posted:  "I'm searching for best questions to ask on a walk through. New to the industry and would welcome your input." and then "Working on a bid proposal and have scheduled a walk through at the client's locations. I'd like to know specific questions and or best practices that I should use when doing the walk through."

Chuch (Arizona) posted:  "Bids are very precise things versus a RFP/RFQ's or Quotes. If a bid and you can offer something no one else can then push for your strengths to be included e.g. if you can offer PCL at no cost (or PPDM) try to have it included. If its a large opportunity do a SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats) analysis over your known competition. If its an RFP or RFQ I've had good luck by offering something of true value that others would charge extra for, this sets you apart and gives reasons for justifying a higher cost."

Me (New Jersey) posted:

1. Take a picture of each device (this helps jog the memory banks)
2. Takes notes for all accessories or options on each device
3. Find users for the device and ask them what type of media do they print onto (card stock, envelopes, ncr, bond paper, etc..)
4. Print out a configuration list for each device
5. Ask a user what they like most about the system and then ask what they dislike the most
6. Ask a user what paper sizes they are printing, scanning, faxing or copying onto
7. Record serial numbers and or ID's of each device
8. Print a meter count from each device, the more comprehensive the better
9. If possible make of map of the device locations along with department names and key user
10. Drill down or aks if they are using OEM or Third Party apps with the device

Walkthrough's use to be simple.  As the population of "Smart" MFP's grow along with the use of embedded solution software we'll need to be diligent with our process of each device.

My favorite is to make a map of the location and place the MFP's in the departments with a comprehensive list (like the one above) for each device.

This question was posed to Print4Pay Hotel members by someone new in the industry and after a day there were great responses to help and help is all about the Print4Pay Hotel forums.  There's no end users , no sales recruiters (like linkedin groups), you're able to find answers and ask for advise in a closed and secure forum.  To date we have over 2,300 members from around the world.  Please take a trip to Print4Pay Hotel.

 

-=Good Selling=-

 

 

I Want My....I Want My..... SMART MFP

MTV, the Eighties, what a special place in time for some of us!  So, where am I going with this??  Not really sure yet, however I wanted to give end users a little more insight on today's MFP's (Multifunctional Products/Printers).

Years ago we called them copy machines,  of course they were used to make copies, about ten to twelve years ago we saw the transformation of copy machines (analog) to digital copiers.  The only difference was that the manufacturers had the technology to convert the scanned page to a digital format and then use a laser beam to write the image to the photo conductor (drum).  The old copiers (analog) that were unreliable, service intensive and the butt of office jokes was transformed into reliable hi speed copiers that could scan and print from the network. 

So, a few years back, digital copiers took another leap forward with the ability to add software cards (Java) that would allow the digital copiers to become work flow and information hubs in the office.  This next generation is what I call a SMART MFP, pretty much they are designed to work with software that will enhance productivity and increase efficiencies in the office. 

Today's SMART MFP's will allow users to scan documents as scan2word, scan2excel, scan2ftp, scan2url, scan2sharepoint, scan2folder, scan2drive and process them as search able pdf's, editable pdfs, index, and OCR and that's just the tip of the iceberg.  I could probably bore you to tears with all of the applications that are available today.

What I see in the field is that most end users still treat the MFP as a commodity, clients looking to buy on price instead of buying on savings . Let me elaborate on the savings, the savings would come from saving countless hours of handling and managing a paper based work flow. If you can cut 10-20 hours a month of labor, that's a big savings. How about if you could cut 5 hours of labor per month per employee?  It can be done with today's SMART MFPs.

If I were an end user I'd want my MFP to process all of those mundane tasks related with the handling of paper. I'd also want my MFP to tell me who is printing what (files) and how many along with having restrictions of what files they can and can't print. If I were using forms, I'd like to be able to have my MFP print onto  NCR paper and auto staple these forms so I don't have to buy them from a print shop.  While I'm at it, why can't I have a virtual (cloud) fax numbers for all of my employees do they can send and received faxes from the PC's without wasting time going to and from the MFP. 

Good news is that everything I mentioned above can be done with SMART MFP's.

-=Good Selling=