A Cost Analysis
Comparing technology costs is never an apple-to-apple exercise. Different technology solutions provide different value, pricing, and perhaps even different sales and support obligations. Please keep the following in perspective:
Some of our competitors may give you their solutions free or at a significantly reduced discount. Remember that nothing in this world is free!
In order to access their solutions, you may be required to purchase equipment through their dealership network, or cartridges through their supply chain, or other similar business arrangements that may ultimately restrict the kind of market decisions you can make and the opportunities you can pursue.
- You lose flexibility in how you support your clients - your choices become limited
- You lose the ability to source for better pricing, selection, and value
- If you fail to maintain certain volume thresholds or decide to source products elsewhere, you lose access to the solution. What might this mean to your business in the long-term? Shouldn’t stability be an important criteria in any technology solution you decide to implement, stability for you and your clients?
Always Equate Price with Value
You need to equate price with value. If all you’re getting are meter reads and the ability to distribute costs, does this equate to what you get with the Miracom Solution? Of course not! It’s important to know what you’re paying for when you compare pricing!
Support costs and requirements are important to understand as well. For example:
- How easy or difficult is it to aggregate data from multiple print devices, across multiple print environments? Will special reports need to be created, data exported, scripts written? Who’s going to do all this work, and maintain it?
- What other functionality might be missing that would otherwise allow you to streamline your current business processes and reduce operational expenses?
- If your customer’s server goes down, does your solution go down?
- If you need the application re-configured, some functionality turned on or off, who does it? You or your customer? Is this a burden on them? How long of a wait might you have before they get around to it? Whose solution is it anyway?
These are important questions that can impact the value of the solution, and its long-term costs!
Based on the value you receive, we believe that the Miracom Solution is the most cost effective solution in the market. And successful service providers recoup the cost of our solution through improved process efficiencies and increased revenue, which is all part of the ROI Story!