Managed print services are often thought of as an option for huge companies. But is it also a strategy that can help small or mid-size businesses?

We talked with Bill Melo at Toshiba America about Managed Print Services (MPS), an area where Toshiba has been active for five years and one that is growing steadily. With MPS, vendors or their dealers take over the client’s whole printing and copying infrastructure. That means allowing the client to treat printing and copying as a utility, which is supplied by the dealer, and paid for (much like electricity or water) on a usage basis at the end of each month. All the headaches (maintaining equipment, managing inventories, and integrating into corporate IT operations) are handled by the dealer/vendor.

What are the main reasons that a company would decide to use MPS?

Historically speaking, the basic advantages are in terms of the three factors: cost, control and convenience. Cost: We have seen that companies have regularly shown savings of 20-30% over their current costs of printing and copying. Control: Most companies for the first time have an accurate measure of how much they are spending on these activities. Convenience: The IT or the purchasing department is relieved from having to worry about supplies management, equipment malfunctions and complex billing issues. The convenience of a single monthly bill with a detailed accounting for both color and black-and-white usage allows most executives to understand and manage for the first time the costs of outputting office documents.

You said “historically.” Are there more recent trends?

We are now seeing two new aspects of Managed Print Services. More and more customers want us to help them with environmental concerns as part of a corporate green initiative. That can involve measuring and improving such areas as electricity use, paper waste, CO₂ generation and solid waste recycling. They want us to provide a measurable solution.

A second area is security. Most companies are getting better at protecting their servers and their internal network traffic. But they are just waking up to the idea that their printers and MFPs have hard disks and generate their own confidential network traffic. All new machines have a wealth of features for setting up security, but they are hard to set up and harder to coordinate into a company-wide plan. So companies come to us or our dealers to put together a security plan as part of the MPS.

I think most people think that MPS would be a no-brainer for a Fortune 1000 company, but that a company that makes $10 million or has 100 employees can’t afford it.

On the contrary, we think that the proportional savings might be even greater for smaller companies. The biggest impact on cash flow is that with MPS you pay for services actually used, rather than buying or leasing equipment and stockpiling supplies. In smaller companies, the IT and purchasing departments are even more hard pressed than in the largest ones. For example, one of our Florida dealers worked with a small company that had only two copier/MFPs and five printers. Using MPS, they were able to realize hard savings of 20-30% by bringing some order to the consumables and service issues.

One fear I would imagine most potential customers would have is that you would tear out all the older equipment, including paid-off printers and MFPs, just so you could move more Toshiba equipment.

While we are glad to install Toshiba equipment when needed, we typically will maintain as much as possible the existing equipment that works. One of our first jobs is to do an audit of the current configuration. We try to make best use of what you have, and we replace machines only where there is newer and more cost-effective technology. Most of our sites, for example, have printers and MFPs from HP or Lexmark. We will maintain and deliver supplies for the equipment you have if that makes the most sense for the customer.

Isn’t it something new for you and your dealers — instead of pushing more boxes, you’re selling a service? How are you adjusting?

Actually, it wasn’t hard for the dealers — in general, they see themselves as selling services already. It was harder at corporate — we needed a mindset shift. What we have come to realize is that hiring a company to manage print services is much like hiring a company to renovate your kitchen. In the end, the customer wants to get quoted a single price, not having to worry about the cost of paint or tiles. Our challenge is to provide services that match and surpass what customers had before and, at the same time, improve our costs of doing business to increase profitability. It’s a different revenue model for Toshiba, but we see that it’s the wave of the future.

Bill Melo is Vice President of Marketing & Enterprise Services and Solutions at Toshiba America Business Solutions, Inc. (TABS). Bill oversees product and services marketing including the development and delivery of Toshiba’s Encompass Document Management and Output Assessment and Managed Print programs.

Tags: Bill Melo, Managed Print Services, MPS, Toshiba