Better Planning and Management
The cost of the Miracom Solution is nominal when you consider that most service providers find that the application can quickly pay for itself! While our application will enable you to pursue new business, and grow your revenue, it also enables you to improve operating efficiencies, which lead to cost savings and larger profit margins. From these larger margins and revenue growth, you will easily be able to cost justify the Miracom Solution.
Here are some return-on-investment (ROI) points you may want to consider:
ROI Example Number One
Functionality: Consumable Replenishment Date (CRD) Alert Management
Description: Based on consumable yield history data by device (printer, copier, facsimile), the application will let you know how many days of toner are remaining in a cartridge, irrespective of the low toner alert. You can identify a time period of your choosing, for example, and discover how many cartridges will need replacement within an account during that particular period.
ROI Value: This functionality primarily enables more effective management of cartridges and service calls. Extending the life of a cartridge is important because over the lifetime of a print device, cartridge expenditures can total three to five times the actual acquisition cost of the device itself, representing the single largest expenditure a company makes in support of their print environments. Organizations who use CRD Alert Management typically find that the average cartridge still has 10-25 percent of its toner remaining upon registering that first low toner alert, which means you can lower your cartridge costs by that same percentage. You can also manage cartridge change-outs more efficiently, subsequently reducing inventory costs, obsolescence, and theft. You will know when and where replenishment is required days in advance, and can plan accordingly. You will also be able to reduce delivery expenses and, if your technicians handle the cartridge change-outs, you can improve your tech-to-call ratio as well. Prior to responding to a service call, a CRD report can be generated which will inform you how many devices will need their cartridges replaced within the next week, for example, at the site to which you’re traveling. You can then bundle multiple change-outs or drop-offs with the repair job. This reduces unnecessary trips to the client site, lowering travel expenses, while improving the productivity level of your technicians. The savings associated with this functionality are real and verifiable.
ROI Example Number Two
Functionality: Consumable Yield History Reports
Description: Standard deviation calculations based on multiple change-out cycles allow the Miracom Solution to determine yield performance levels on a device-by-device basis regardless of saturation rates and the print environments in which the cartridges are utilized.
ROI Value: With Yield History Reports you will have a complete understanding of the quality of each and every consumable you install. If someone claims they have the best cartridge ever made, you can simply test that cartridge against the average yields you typically get in the print device in which you place the cartridge. You can avoid purchasing poor quality cartridges. Additionally, Yield History Reports enable you to better manage your consumables and the warranties that may or may not come with them. You can even negotiate your own guarantees! You can reduce your liability and recover costs by properly tracking and managing consumable yield data.
ROI Example Number Three
Functionality: Duty Cycle Management
Description: Miracom’s Duty Cycle Management functionality gives you access to the utilization rates of all the print devices under your management. You will know which devices are being under-utilized and which devices are being over-utilized.
ROI Value: Duty cycle data enables you to re-configure and right-size print environments. This allows you to extend the life of equipment, a cost avoidance activity that can save a company a substantial amount of money on unnecessary equipment. It also allows you to improve performance efficiencies, which means that the corporate end user is not waiting around for a print job on a device that is over-utilized. So there are both hard and soft cost savings associated with right-sizing your fleet of print devices. The primary reduction from soft costs comes from an increase in employee (corporate end user) productivity. Over-worked print devices tend to break down more often, which impacts employee productivity — as does waiting around for a document to print from a print device that is either queued with a lot of print jobs or prints too slow for the particular environment that it is suppose to support. Keep in mind that industry experts believe that 30-50 percent of print assets in office environments are underutilized, while 20-30 percent are over utilized. Low device utilization means you are receiving a low return on assets, while high utilization impedes productivity and increases costs. Print environments and equipment change, so do optimization requirements. With Miracom’s Duty Cycle Management capabilities you can track and monitor utilization rates across your entire print environment worldwide. You will know just how optimized your print environments are or are not. You can make changes at any time to those environments, and know immediately the impact of those changes! Utilization information will allow you to reconfigure your print environments, improve efficiency levels, extend the life of the equipment you’re managing, and lower costs.
ROI Example Number Four
Functionality: n-Tier Level Ticketing Description: With n-Tier Level Ticketing you can ticket for service at multiple sub-service provider levels. You control the ticketing process, including who gets a ticket and what data they see. All data is then aggregated. You can turn to as many sub-servicers as you need, and they too can turn to sub-servicers, which explains the mathematical term “n” — because levels of support are endless.
ROI Value: By using n-Tier Level Ticketing, you can pursue large, geographically dispersed accounts that you may not have been able to pursue in the past, which makes you more competitive, subsequently enabling you to increase your revenue. n-Tier Level Ticketing allows you to manage national and multi-national size accounts. Regardless of yours’ and your customer’s size and location, you can support any account worldwide! You can sub-service work to servicers who are located in geographical locations where you are not. You can issue tickets, then track costs and other key data, including service level agreements, aggregate it, and use it in an extensive assortment of reports, including enterprise-wide reporting. You can build your own network of service providers or you can tap into Miracom’s worldwide network of sub-servicers. Why hire new personnel , then build an operational and support infrastructure around them, when you can leverage qualified resources already available in the market? This solution allows you to grow, expand and contract, quickly without incurring significant capital expense.
ROI Example Number Five
Functionality: Real Time Error Codes, Alerts, and Automated Ticketing
Description: The Miracom Solution monitors your customer’s print environment real-time. Among the information you will have access to are all error codes and alerts. You also have access to a live visual representation of print device display panels and all information on it. Error cods and alerts automatically trigger the creation of a service ticket, which a dispatcher can delete, defer, or issue to a technician for service. Performance thresholds can be created for some serviceable events that allow you to determine when a ticket should be generated or not.
ROI Value: With automated ticketing, and real time error codes and alerts, you will know about serviceable issues before you ever hear from your customer. Subsequently, you will be able to quickly and proactively address them. You can react quickly to your customer’s needs, thereby improving your service levels. Most service providers who use the Miracom Solution have a typical service level agreement (SLA) with their customers of between 2-4 hours, whereas traditional service providers usually have SLAs that exceed 4 hours, including 24 hour SLAs. The ability to defer tickets allows you to manage your tech-to-call ratio more efficiently, which saves you money. For example, if you have different service level agreements with your customers for cost per page services as opposed to time and material services, you can defer one ticket until you need to meet the needs of the other. Suppose you have a 4 hour SLA with a customer for CPP and a 24 hour SLA for T&M — you can defer the T&M ticket until you’re out in that general location servicing a CPP ticket. By managing your tech-to-call ratio, you can improve efficiencies and lower costs. By being able to see what is on the display panel, you can improve business efficiencies, allowing you to recognize cost avoidance situations that generate long-term cost savings. For example, it eliminates any confusion between the customer and the dispatcher when a service call request is made. You will know immediately what is wrong, and you and your technicians will be able to respond accordingly. It’s also important to note that the customers themselves can perform some serviceable events, such as powering off and on the print device. If you are able to see that the display panel is reading Cycle Power, for example, you would be able to address this with the customer, thereby improving your tech-to-call ratio. Finally, imagine being able to request an automated ticket whenever a print device incurs a certain number of paper jams over a certain period of time. You then defer that ticket until the next time you’re scheduled to visit the account in which that print device is located, at which time you take care of it. This is being proactive. This is taking care of a small problem before it becomes a big one. This is what you can do by managing serviceable events, thresholds, and performance criteria.
ROI Example Number Six
Functionality: Cost Accounting, Tracking, and Reporting
Description: The Miracom Solution is not a sophisticated cost accounting and quota management tool. Those come a dime a dozen. However, with the Miracom Solution you can still track and report expenditures - you can allocate, distribute, and filter per page costs by device, cost center, location, customer, and even by print device model.
ROI Value: Miracom’s cost accounting, tracking, and reporting capabilities enable you to invoice for services based on the needs of your customers. You can bill for services at an enterprise-wide level or distribute costs back to the source. There’s no better way for your customers to manage the cost of print than for them to make individual cost centers aware of, and responsible for, how much they’re printing! If you’re looking for a solution to bring to market, this is it. If assigning responsibility for costs is important to your customer, we can do it. Miracom also enables you to track and manage your own costs, whether they’re time and material or cost-per-page. With the Miracom Solution, you can see your profit margins by account, and drill down to individual print devices; at any time you can see which devices and accounts are improving your profit margins, and which are destroying them. You will be able to see and address your costs immediately!