Consulting firm Efective Business Printing has tested Nubeprint ZERO. During the test process EBP has experienced how easy and automatic is to start managing printers and copiers with Nubeprint ZERO. In the results EBP concludes that “the tool is really easy to use. The installation process was completely automatic on my Windows 8 machine and printers were discovered without any intervention”.
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN. – Nubeprint recognized as the best software to monitor HP Officejet Pro X in cost per page contracts.
Nubeprint, has been recognized by dealers as the only MPS software not to have problems in managing the HP Officejet Pro X series.
According to dealers providing MPS, Nubeprint with its superior accuracy and elimination of duplicated alerts has proven to be the best solution to manage HP’s Officejet Pro X both in terms of reading counters and managing ink cartridge supply needs. The Officejet Pro X reduces the cost per page up to 50% compared to that of a laser printer, as published by HP, making this printer a good candidate for cost per page contracts. Therefore, to stay competitive in an MPS environment it is critical for dealers to have this control.
Nubeprint wants to thank all of its customers for their collaboration and in recognizing Nubeprint’s continuous drive to be the most reliable, complete and easy to use tool for managed print services.
Nubeprint ZERO is available starting from US$400 (€300) with unlimited number of printers and copiers. It can be acquired directly at the Nubeprint´s web site.
About Nubeprint
Nubeprint is the leader in incorporating Artificial Intelligence to manage output devices. Nubeprint´s adoption of Yield and Lean management methodologies allows MPS players to provide service in a remote, proactive and automatic way, with the highest accuracy level in this Market. This accuracy leads to having a very tight control of the supplies process of when and what supplies and parts will be needed and for what device. This “control” results in an immediate positive impact on the profitability of the MPS provider. The ROI of moving to Nubeprint is achieved as quickly as the deployment is made, boosting the profit of existing MPS businesses. Nubeprint designs its algorithms and BPM seeking for the reduction of environmental impact of customers using its technology (www.nubeprint.com)
– By Antonio Sánchez Navarro & Andrés Ripoll Merchan –
In our previous publication of this set of articles (Lean Management in MPS – Part 3) we started to discuss how the Dealer’s business is influenced by the usage of an MPS solution that contains Lean components. The first and most evident advantage is that he/she gets benefits for his/her customers. As a result the dealer differentiates his/her offering to compete in aspects other than the price. But there are many other benefits around that we will explore now.
a) Cost oriented advantages
The distribution activity is a burden that the dealer can often solve by sharing the workload resposibilities and cost with the distributor (see “Lean Management in Managed Print Services (Part 2)” for more details).
The teamwork between the dealer and the distributor has worked for long time as a successful tandem in the IT market. But the situation is changing due to the fact that the dealer now knows with accuracy and in advance, what the needs of its customers are in the following weeks or even months. As a result, the traditional manual order triggering process is being replaced by an auto-fulfillment process. Powered by yield management systems, the auto-fulfillment process in place identifies the need for toner or drum or any other supply or part, evaluates when it is the right moment to trigger the shipment, and automatically notifies to order fulfillment department. There are no more calls from the customer to initiate the process. The dealer’s order fulfillment department works with accurate and detailed forecasts knowing the cartridges references that have to be delivered during the next 3 months. So the question is whether the dealer is willing to move the whole supply management chain to the distributor. Instead it may want to keep the control of triggering the deliveries. I am afraid there is not a single answer. While some dealers are excited to move it all to their distributor partner, others decide to keep it under their umbrella.
With a yield management MPS tool in place, the inventory turnover accelerates. Both the overage and underage costs are minimized at the warehouse, and so is the size of the stock. A tens flow policy is now at no risk for the dealer, even for the service department. As a result, services are solved quicker: the down-time of the printer or copier diminishes, and so does the dealers’ cost.
The predictability capability of the yield management tool is also used to identify lost business opportunities. It is now easy to figure out all those SKUs that the dealer does not carry but that the customer is buying from a competitor. By adding the SKUs to its catalog, the dealer can then increase its sales to its customers, while locking out the competitors from its accounts.
b) Business strategy oriented advantages
One of the most important strategic decisions that the dealer can make once they have put in place an MPS yield management tool is how to use the business intelligence component. Indeed it is a huge qualitative step towards a new way of managing their business. Quite frankly, this is where many of the dealers struggle. It shouldn’t be so, because it is as easy as responding to the following question: if it happens that somebody tells you that you can increase your sales by 10% by just adding 20 new SKUs to your catalog, wouldn’t you just do it? Though the answer is obvious, the reality is that many dealers (most of them small ones) have no time other than to manage their day to day work. In other words: they are waiting for someone else to tell them what specifically they have to do to grow.
Yield management MPS tools open new opportunities for consultants. No matter if the tool is hosted by a distributor, by the OEM or the dealer itself, the consultant uses the business intelligence embedded to identify the opportunities specific to each party. The kinds of questions yield management MPS tools provide answers to are the following:
- Which are the most profitable contracts?
- Which of those contracts does the dealer lose money in?
- How should the dealer improve the order fulfillment process in order to avoid the waste of toner?
- What are the printer models in which the profit is the highest?
- Is the risk the same with printers of any vendors (in terms of profit)?
Lean management applied by a dealer does not only reassign the internal resources for a best in class infrastructure. Longer term the business strategy is also amended to both develop the most profitable business and to address those missing opportunities.
Another consequence of implementing a yield management tool and to handle the MPS business from a lean approach, is the re-designing of the co-working with the customer itself, and indeed with any stakeholder. As a matter of fact, the customer is the target of any strategy around MPS. They should perceive the consequences of a good management of its printers and copiers in a clear manner. But this will be the content of our next article “Lean Management in MPS (part 5)”.
Nubeprint launches ZERO.V2: New Dashboard for small and medium MPS providers.
Posted by Editorial Team in News
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN. — Nubeprint launches a new version of MPS ZERO for small and medium dealers.
Nubeprint, the MPS technology vendor known for the quality and over superior performance of its tools for managed print services, has just announced the launch of its new version of ZERO. It is the first step of its “make easy the complex” strategy, and addresses the needs of small and medium Dealers.
ZERO.V2 keeps its known original features and quality: only one time alert (consumable & technical), control of wasted toner when cartridge is replaced too early, control of availability of devices, counters for billing, and its unique PrinterCloud where the most recent status of the printer and its delivered services is accessed with just one click. The new version includes a complete state of the art Scorecard (Nubeprint MPS Technology) that lets the dealer identify at a glance when there are symptoms that something is not going as expected: trend of technical alerts and paper jams, printing activity trend, offline DCA’s, monitoring rates are just examples. Nubeprint has also incorporated consultancy services like the automatic detection of printers and copiers that should be replaced. Zero.V2 simplifies the process of the dealer to generate a proposal: in just a few days, the system automatically provides a forecast of the volume of print-outs and supplies that each customer will experience with its current printers and copiers, and which of these printers should be replaced. Nubeprint’s company goal is to contribute to sustainability. Complex algorithms are applied which measures how environmentally friendly the customer is managing their print devices and helps guide them in reducing their environmental foot-print.
Nubeprint ZERO is available starting from US$400 (€300) with unlimited number of printers and copiers. It could be acquired at the Nubeprint´s web site.
About Nubeprint
Nubeprint is the leader in incorporating Artificial Intelligence to manage output devices. Nubeprint´s adoption of Yield and Lean management methodologies allows MPS players to provide service in a remote, proactive and automatic way, with the highest accuracy level in this Market. This accuracy leads to having a very tight control of the supplies process of when and what supplies and parts will be needed and for what device. This “control” results in an immediate positive impact on the profitability of the MPS provider. The ROI of moving to Nubeprint is achieved as quickly as the deployment is made, boosting the profit of existing MPS businesses. Nubeprint designs its algorithms and BPM seeking for the reduction of environmental impact of customers using its technology (www.nubeprint.com)
– By Antonio Sánchez Navarro & Andrés Ripoll Merchan –
In our previous article on Lean management in MPS, we talked, from the perspective of the distributor, how MPS benefits from Lean management principle: creating more value for customers with fewer resources (see more atLean Enterprise Institute). Once a distributor implements lean management into its MPS business, it sees reduction in costs, a streamlining of current processes, an increase in sales and improved loyalty from the dealers. The results show up in a very short time frame. But the distributor is not the only one to benefit from the process, the dealer does as well. Due to the dealers’ exposure to the customer, the dealer is the one that will benefit the most in having a well deployed and managed MPS program that includes lean control components.
Dealers:
The dealer has full exposure in a non-controlled MPS program. When billing for printed pages, he/she is assuming all the risks of all the variable costs. This lack of control results is great losses in the dealers P&L statement. Duplicate shipments, lost cartridges, early cartridges replacement are just few of the problems that are the most common causes for a dealer experiencing frustration in MPS. For these reasons, an MPS infrastructure is best to orientate and deploy services from a lean perspective. A full set of advantages then show up and take care of these challenges naturally on a daily basis. These advantages can be summarized under the following categories:
a) Customer oriented advantages
The customer can finally move all the responsibilities of managing the printing resources to an external supplier: the dealer. This can only be done when the needs of all printers are so well under control and proactively managed by the dealer, that there is truly no more need for the user to pay attention to the local stock of toner and/or have to manually order any supply.
Once this is accomplished, the customer can focus on its own business. He/she delegated the tasks of managing the printing resources, but do not abdicate his responsibilities. The customer still remains in control of the following two aspects:
- The printer’s operation: the user has both the capacity and the tools to verify at any point of time that the printer is well managed. A Dashboard provided by the dealer indicates to which extend the cartridges are delivered at the appropriate moment of time (not too early, not too late), and if the installation of toner (and other supplies) is done on time or too early. The access to this information ensures a “green attitude” by minimizing the waste. The technical issues are handled and closed on time, therefore reducing the number of visits of the technician and the down time of the printer.
- The printer’s cost: In the end, the customer remains responsible for the final cost of printing. Whether he/she pays per page or pays per cartridge, the customer has full transparency to understand that the cost per page is fair. The quality of the service is the first and major indicator. But should there be cartridges lost after their delivery, or should there be waste of toner due to an early cartridge replacement, all this is the responsibility of the customer. If the dealer has set up the necessary tools to help the customer perform these tasks, and if the customer fails to do so, it is fair that these corresponding cost increases are applied to the customer from the dealer. The dealer remains responsible for the control, identifying any deviation from the best business practice.
The dealer’s proposal shall necessarily include the controls and transparency mentioned above as part of its service.
On top of the customer oriented advantages, lean applied to MPS generates cost oriented advantages and business strategy oriented advantages. All together they shape the new ecosystem for the dealer, where its value added proposition (service and consultancy) becomes more relevant than its transactional business, under the eyes of its customers. We shall see these advantages in more detail in Part 4 of this set of articles.
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN.- Nubeprint’s new “ZERO click” offering.
Today Nubeprint has launched “ZERO Click”. With this unique offering to the MPS Market place Nubeprint is confirming the confidence it has with their technology’s accuracy. This new version of Nubeprint’s Cloudprinting Suite ZERO will allow the SMB Office Dealer to manage unlimited devices and pay only when they receive a “correct alert”. As a result a dealer will now automatically execute supply fulfillment to their customers, and will only pay when a sale of a consumable or part takes place: “You make a sale; you pay for the automatic shipment alert”. ZERO is the most powerful and reliable tool for the “proactive management” of printing devices, agnostic to brand, type of device and age.
ZERO features include: Business Dashboard with score boards, device status views, alerts thresholds based on days or percentage, how much consumable is thrown away when a cartridge is replaced, date of replacement, automatically calculated reports providing the meters and pages to bill for per page contracts, and much more.
“SMB Office Dealers and consumable suppliers must have the same opportunity as the largest dealers to serve their customers requirements without having the burdensome investments. “ZERO Click” is a significant step forward to add more value for their customers, and to differentiate themselves from their competitors without eroding their margins. The dealer will gain control and automate its operating processes, therefore, reducing its costs and those of its customers. MPS is not a sales process, it is an added value service to customers. If the Dealer has not optimized his internal processes from the beginning, his next step to expand further into MPS will be a costly failure”. Antonio Sanchez Navarro, Nubeprint´s President.
About Nubeprint
Nubeprint is the leader in incorporating Artificial Intelligence to the management of output devices. Nubeprint´s adoption of Yield and Lean management methodologies allows MPS players to provide service in a remote, proactive and automatic way, with the highest accuracy level in this Market. This accuracy leads to having a very tight control of the supplies process of when and what supplies and parts will be needed and for what device. This “control” results in an immediate positive impact on the profitability of the MPS provider. The ROI of moving to Nubeprint is achieved as quickly as the deployment is made, boosting the profit of existing MPS businesses. (www.nubeprint.com)
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN. — Nubeprint shares its customer’s experiences:
Copiadoras Innovadas, S.A. Sharp and Brother certified dealer. Based in Madrid, Copiadoras Innovadas has been providing national coverage for over 25 years, servicing customers of all business sectors (Public Administration, Financial and Industrial). Mr. Andrés Buendía, General Manager of Copiadoras Innovadas, comments on his experience with Nubeprint: “Since early 2011 our ERP has been fully integrated with Nubeprint’s Yield Management Solution. We have automated the purchase and supply process of consumables, from providers to us and from us to our customers. Since that moment, we have never lost a cartridge and practically eliminated toner waste. As a result, we have reduced our projects costs and our consumables needs forecast is fully accurate. We also have improved our stock turnover and now our pay per page proposals has become much more competitive. With this, our customer’s satisfaction level has greatly improved due to the new level of service that we can now provide by utilizing this technology”. (www.copiadorasinnovadas.com)
About Nubeprint
Nubeprint is the leader in incorporating Artificial Intelligence to the management of output devices. Nubeprint´s adoption of Yield and Lean management methodologies allows MPS players to provide service in a remote, proactive and automatic way, with the highest accuracy level in this Market. This accuracy leads to having a very tight control of the supplies process of when and what supplies and parts will be needed and for what device. This “control” results in an immediate positive impact on the profitability of the MPS provider. The ROI of moving to Nubeprint is achieved as quickly as the deployment is made, boosting the profit of existing MPS businesses. (www.nubeprint.com)
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN. — Nubeprint announces the incorporation of Copiadoras Digitales México to its international distribution network:
Copiadoras Digitales México, S.A. de C.V. (www.copiadoras-digitales.com.mx). Since 2011, has operated throughout Mexico with headquarters in Toluca and offices in Monterrey, NL and Distrito Federal. Jose Domingo Aguilar, general manager of CDM says: “From the beginning, our goal has been to provide our clients advice, service and solutions in printing and copying equipment. After analyzing the market offering, we found in Nubeprint the partner that provides the piece we needed to complete our service offering. The reliability of supplies alerts, the comprehensive and automatic control of the supply process and the usage and collection of cartridges, allows us, not only to reduce costs on supplies, logistics and inventory turnover, but to automate the service to our customers, almost entirely. This automation results in savings in both sides, the client and the service provider, and also is environmentally friendly. Based on the above arguments, CDM has decided not only to use Nubeprint to better service its customers but also has joined Nubeprint´s international network of Authorized Distributors for Mexico
About Nubeprint
Nubeprint is the leader in incorporating Artificial Intelligence to the management of output devices. Nubeprint´s adoption of Yield and Lean management methodologies allows MPS players to provide service in a remote, proactive and automatic way, with the highest accuracy level in this Market. This accuracy leads to having a very tight control of the supplies process of when and what supplies and parts will be needed and for what device. This “control” results in an immediate positive impact on the profitability of the MPS provider. The ROI of moving to Nubeprint is achieved as quickly as the deployment is made, boosting the profit of existing MPS businesses. (www.nubeprint.com)
Nubeprint launches a new integrated module to manage local consumable stock at the customer site
Posted by Editorial Team in News
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN. — Nubeprint launches today its “Local consumables stock management module”.
Nubeprint´s efforts to help MPS providers to “squeeze every ounce of profit out of their MPS contracts” have launched a new local stock module integrated into the CloudPrinting Suite solution. With it, MPS providers will reduce their logistic and inventory management costs while reducing drastically the cartridges “disappearance” and wasted toner. The consequence is a full automated control of any cartridge stocked at your customer’s offices, in the same way as if they were in their own warehouse. This control is aligned with the predictive information & management about supplies & parts needs Nubeprint provides. No more recovering or reassigning cartridges when devices are changed or retired by the customer.
About Nubeprint
Nubeprint is the leader in incorporating Artificial Intelligence to the management of output devices. Nubeprint´s adoption of Yield and Lean management methodologies allows MPS players to provide service in a remote, proactive and automatic way, with the highest accuracy level in this Market. This accuracy leads to having a very tight control of the supplies process of when and what supplies and parts will be needed and for what device. This “control” results in an immediate positive impact on the profitability of the MPS provider. The ROI of moving to Nubeprint is achieved as quickly as the deployment is made, boosting the profit of existing MPS businesses. (www.Nubeprint.com)
– By Antonio Sánchez Navarro & Andrés Ripoll Merchan –
In our previous article (Click here to access Part 1) we have established the link between Lean management and MPS. Indeed, this philosophy has brought many companies’ success (Wal*Mart, Inditex, Dell) and no matter the size of the company, it is top of mind of the most successful CEOs and COOs.
Appling lean management to MPS may be a big inconvenience and does require a specific technology to make it happen. Without it, the MPS solution put in place remains limited to a handful set of actions like billing based on cost per page, and little more. But on the opposite side, once you have the appropriate infrastructure technology in place, the advantages are huge:
- immediate cost savings,
- increase of sales through identifying new opportunities,
- customer satisfaction increase through a better, automated and accurate outsource of his/her printing resources,
- better purchase conditions through the alignment of the objectives with the vendor and / or the distributor.
Yield management.
Many dealers and distributors have implemented an MPS solution that relies on monitoring technology. As a result, their current expenses grow quicker than revenues, their warehouse is out of control, and the number of calls requesting urgent deliveries grows as quickly as the frustration of their customers. In summary, an MPS business that relies only on monitoring technology goes along with the lack of a reasonable profit greatly, and inhibits the efforts to grow an MPS program.
The usage of the appropriate technology is a must. By grabbing 3 to 10 pieces of data from each remote printer or copier, the technology has to notify about the current needs of toner, parts and services, predict future needs and forecast them. This is what yield management accomplishes when applied to MPS.
We can then define Yield management as the process of understanding, anticipating and influencing printer behavior in order to maximize yield or profits from a fixed, perishable resource (extracted from the definition in Wikipedia). “Yield management involves strategic control of inventory to sell it to the right customer, to the right printer, at the right time, for the right price.” When managing hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of printers, the only way to come to manage this volume of information is by using the appropriate technology: yield management technology. The technology becomes responsible for the success of an MPS program.
By anticipating the behavior of each printer or copier, MPS yield management technology determines when it is the right moment to order, and when it is the right moment to ship to the customer. This is the basic ingredient around which the Distributor in the printing distribution chain takes advantages of MPS under a lean management attitude.
The Distributor.
A yield management system powering an MPS solution anticipates the needs for toner and parts for the coming weeks, months or even years.
The time frame of the prediction has a big influence on the way it is used and benefited from.
- Short term forecast: In a time frame small enough, the content of the forecast is based on the needs from printers that are currently operating. Therefore, the shortest it the term, the more accurate is the forecast. Indeed it shows when the current cartridges are needed to be replaced. The short term forecast is equivalent to pre-ordering a supply so that it will arrive in a few weeks time. If the Distributor knows in a consistent way 45 days in advance what will be ordered, it will adapt the warehouse by ordering more units of what it is lacking, and reduce the number of units on those references where the stock is overcrowded compared to the predicted volume. The Distributor is indeed accelerating its inventory turn-over.
Carrying large inventories is one of the major and most frequent wastes detected by lean management. This large inventory does not only represent having money invested in something that is not producing an immediate profit and stressing your cash flow. It also enables additional inefficiencies:
- investment in space that is not for free,
- people taking care of it, both physically and virtually,
- risk of obsolescence and a lot of other small waste.
Therefore, thinking lean is getting rid of unnecessary inventory as a way to be more profitable.
- Long term forecast indicates the SKUs and individual quantities that are likely to be ordered in a one year time frame. Such forecast is based in the portfolio of printers and copiers and not individualized per device. The risk of a printer or copier to be replaced is high enough not to use this forecast as an anticipated order, but more like a volume indicator. Keep in mind that if a printer is replaced by a different model, the SKUs change. While a short term forecast helps to determine what the purchases to vendors should be, a long term forecast is useful to accordingly size and allocate warehouse resources. It is also used to negotiate with vendors’ volume discounts and purchase compromises.
Knowing what the needs are, facilitates shipping what is needed when it is needed (remember the definition of Yield management). Goods can then be continuously dispatched to distributor’s warehouse, repacked and dispatched to dealers or end-customers often without ever sitting in the inventory. As a result, the distributor benefits from reduced inventory costs.
MPS is part of the marketing plan of a Distributor:
The long term forecast contains behavior information about the printers and copiers. It is indeed a source of information for the marketing department of the distributor. It opens up new business opportunities by identifying those SKUs for which there is a need but that are currently not in its catalog. These are purchases that the customers (dealers) are currently buying from the competition: the so called lost opportunities. The Distributor determines the business opportunities by using the expected volume that the MPS yield management system provides. Its decision is also influenced by the marginal cost of distribution of a new product reference. But the marginal cost is optimized by reducing the inventory, as seen above. Therefore, the Distributor that accelerates the inventory turn-over can manage a larger number of references at the same marginal cost, and for the same warehouse resources in place.
By selling more to the current customers, the Distributor increases its revenues with very little investment: no need to have larger warehouse facilities and no penalty in costs as a consequence of adding products with a rotation lower than normal (this happens when the inventory turn-over is normalized for all references, as previously seen). The growth of revenues combined with stable costs implies larger profit.
A Distributor which objective is to increase the revenue and the profit, should seriously consider to put in place an MPS infrastructure as part of the marketing plan strategy to sell more to its current customers. The effect is that the retention rate increases at the same time that the Distributor does not leave any business opportunity in its customers unattended. Maximizing the customers is equivalent to protecting the market share.
MPS is a strategic opportunity for the Distributor to reach a sustainable profitable growth with very little investment. In a similar way, the Dealer does benefit from MPS and the lean management spirit that lies behind. But this will be our next article.
