New Offerings Underscore the Maturation of MPS
With a plethora of new products and services customized for certain groups of end-users, all of the companies in the MPS space seem to be busy sub-segmenting the market. Over the past few months, the industry has seen the launch of a spate of new applications that allow better penetration of specific market segments. As the market has matured and MPS has achieved a new level of acceptance, it has attracted a diverse mix of new customers and practitioners. The days of "one-size-fits-all" offerings are long gone. Of course, by supporting an ever-widening collection of end-users, manufacturers and their channel partners are further driving demand for MPS in all market segments regardless if the client is small, medium or large.
Let's take a closer look at some of the new products launched in the past couple of months that are bound to either drive new sales, make ongoing operations more efficient—or both.
At the end of March, Konica Minolta launched its new bizhub vCare Mobile application. Using a mobile device, the new app provides technicians and other service team members with comprehensive, real-time diagnostics for any of the bizhub vCare-connected devices they maintain. Konica Minolta offers the technology free to all its registered business partners using the vCare DRM solution. The bizhub vCare Mobile also delivers auto-service call dispatching and device-generated supply replenishment alerts, and it supplies users with basic machine information such as registration date and meter counts along with reporting print volume, toner usage, and machine uptime.
News of Konica-Minolta's latest MPS app followed the debut of Ricoh Americas Corporation new @Remote Enterprise Pro technology. Used in concert with Ricoh's @Remote Connector fleet management software, the new @Remote Enterprise Pro technology expands the capabilities of Ricoh's Intelligent Remote Management System to support enterprise-level organizations. It enables large organizations to manage hundreds to thousands of networked devices from a single app. @Remote Enterprise Pro delivers detailed reports via Ricoh's secure Web-based portal so system administrators can scrutinize various usage characteristics, including page counts, page sizes, duplex versus simplex, monochrome versus color and other network activity. It can automate service and toner alerts and communicate directly to service providers as well as support remote firmware upgrades.
The introductions of these two technologies within 48 hours of each other illustrate nicely how manufacturers are slicing and dicing the market to better support individual segments. Konica Minolta's bizhub vCare Mobile will be great for dealers' service fleets, while the Ricoh technology will support the in-house IT teams of organizations with large, far-flung installations.
Hardware manufacturers are not the only ones offering new tools to help efficiently maintain equipment. A few weeks ago, Katun Corporation and BEI Services announced they've incorporated what they've dubbed "Demand Time" territory-alignment software into the BEI Services component of Katun's Customer Solutions Program. The program is designed to provide assistance when assigning technicians' coverage territories or regions. After assigned, the technology can then be used to monitor each territory and make adjustments as needed without adversely affecting other areas of the assigned workload.
Beyond providing better ways to monitor and maintain equipment, innovative new tools are being released that should allow sales reps to close more deals. The software developer NewField IT added a new feature to its Asset DB in February that enables consultants and sales reps to view user-specific printing habits and device output activity on a floor map. The result: MPS professionals can show clients how a specific user or department uses a particular device or group of devices. It delivers deep reporting details, including print volumes, paper types, or the amount of color a user or group prints via a particular device or group of devices. Rather than relying on usage assumptions, the technology is designed to provide hard data to help sales teams garner consumer acceptance of new implementation plans and close deals more quickly.
Companies are also providing sales teams with enhanced mentoring support. Earlier this year, MPS Results launched its MPS Fusion program. It delivers 12 weekly one-hour sessions via the phone and web that coach participants launching and managing an MPS business unit. MPS Results says its MPS Fusion curriculum provides insights into business planning, recruiting and hiring, compensation programs, sales management and methodology, and more. It includes tools and templates to help implement all aspects of the sales and operational process. Additional support is also available through the MPS Fusion Round Table, an on-going forum for MPS professionals to interface and share experiences.
All this activity demonstrates that manufacturers and their channel partners are gaining better insights into the various strata of consumers that make up the MPS market. They are now well on their way to tailoring products to meet the particular needs of smaller and smaller sub-segments. This is great news for the MPS industry because it is bound to fuel new growth.
I've seen the same phenomenon in the hardware market for decades. More and more machines are added to product lines to precisely match the device with a price-performance ratio required to attract a specific sub-set of end-users. Speeds and feeds and feature sets are all adjusted and placed into increasingly narrow price brands. The results are a range of models that are not too feature rich, and not too bare bones, but just right to attract savvy end-users. Something similar happened with supplies, too The price and page yields of cartridges were adjusted and now there are low-priced SKUs for folks who don't print much and higher-priced, higher-yield SKUs for those who demand more pages from their cartridges.
Without being specific, I'd like to add in closing that I often find it easy to be skeptical about the success of certain initiatives I've seen within the MPS market. That said, it's clear that various players in the space are becoming savvy to the needs of a diverse group of potential customers, and are attacking the market with a sophisticated product mix that is bound to attract more customers.
Posted by Charlie Brewer on 04/13/2011