Many organisations are shifting towards a more responsive IT environment that is at the same time more self-reliant. Manufacturers are striving to enhance customer satisfaction through improved service availability whilst enterprises want to shift the service responsibility away from their IT departments to their suppliers and service providers. Consequently today's service landscape requires collaboration between product manufacturers, their service partners and users of the equipment to maximise the value and uptime of assets.
Traditionally service has been viewed as a reactive process - repairing products when they fail. However, service is now a key competitive differentiator contributing to customer loyalty which can guarantee a higher level of asset availability and drive value, customer loyalty and also profitability. Therefore delivering service excellence centres on ensuring devices are less likely to malfunction in the first place. By providing remote maintenance, vendors can offer predictive support which can trigger preventative action. Not only can this drive service and maintenance-based revenues for the vendor and its channel partners, but it can improve device uptime and availability for the user.
Document output devices such as printers, copiers and multifunction peripherals (MFPs) are typically the most support intensive elements of the IT infrastructure. Printers need regular maintenance and replenishing with paper, toner or ink, and every call to the support desk uses up valuable resources. Furthermore, many copier-based devices are purchased on a contract that requires meter readings for billing purposes which often need to be performed manually on-site. Keeping on top of inventories and ensuring timely replenishment, requesting service engineers as well as managing invoicing all add to the complexity of managing the print environment. Poor provision of all this often leads to frustration for end users.
Many suppliers of document output devices rely on their channel partners to deliver service excellence, and in a market characterised by shrinking margins it is ever more important that these partners have the tools to offer them recurring revenue opportunities from both supplies and service. Remote monitoring solutions for document output devices provide service data relating to usage, maintenance requirements and supplies levels enabling a proactive service approach to maintenance, billing and supplies management. This can lead to fewer service interventions, increased uptime, more effectively managed inventories, higher employee productivity and lower total cost of ownership.
The objective of remote monitoring platforms is to automate these tasks as much as possible, thereby improving service continuity for users, and improving the customer relationship for manufacturers and their service partners that are able to build proactive service relationships which in turn can drive greater customer loyalty.
This report provides a comparison of the major remote print environment monitoring platforms available in the European market.
