Our industry has officially adopted a new acronym called SBB and it’s here to stay! I believe SBB has the potential to be disruptive, in a positive way, in our market today. So, what exactly is SBB?
Managed Print
Before we define SBB, let’s go back to another acronym called MPS. Managed Print Services has evolved, changed, slowed down and started up again in the past five years. It has been defined, redefined, renamed, rebranded and relaunched. Regardless of how you define MPS or what you do with your program, you’ve probably had some challenges here. One of the challenges that many customers and dealers have with MPS is the ability to capture true output volume and track that volume on a regular basis.
The Future of Managed Print
Enter Seat Based Billing, the new acronym in town. SBB is the future of Managed Print. SBB takes away all the manual process that dealers and customers experience trying to capture output volumes. It is contracted as an agreed upon payment for your MPS program based on number of users. So how does this work? The program starts with a dealer assessment of your current state of end user printing behaviors. The agreed upon billing for the program will consist of an average band of users so customers can budget properly for their printing needs. Customers can easily add on billing for additional services such as Help Desk, Management Fees, Managed IT, Telephony, Cloud and more.
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What is the link between SBB and Print Habit Insights?
Dealers will need to use one of the many print management tools that are available on the market today. These tools don’t track network IP address print device volumes. They track end user printing that provides dealers the ability to review with their customers printing habits of employees to help change behaviors and workflow. Workflow is defined as the sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion. The printing of the email is a simple example of workflow. As a customer, wouldn’t you want to know if your employees are printing internal emails out in color costing you potentially four times the cost as a black and white print out.
Customer Business Reviews
As your dealer partner prepares for your quarterly or periodic business review, customers will now gain more insights into printing habits of their employees. How do you get people to change the way they print? One way is to set standards to help people print more effectively. This could be a simple standard around the workflow of printing an email. Yes, copier dealers may want you to print that email in color to bill you more however doesn’t it make more sense to print that email as defaulted to black and white unless there is a valid reason why it should be in color?
Why is SBB important today?
From a customer perspective, employees are still printing documents from computers and mobile devices. Customers want programs that are simple, easy to use and easy to manage. They want to work with dealers that understand their challenges, goals and objectives when it comes to documents and information that flows through their organization.
From a dealer perspective, print volume is declining and there is an explosion of data. The mobile industry is evolving with printing done through mobile applications. Dealers are hungry for a new way to go to market for their customers. SBB provides dealers this path to look at printing from the customer perspective, shift how people print and help customers use the found money to gain more technology advancements. Dealers presenting SBB are the dealers who continue to be on the cutting edge of technology for their customers differentiating themselves from the competition as a true business partner.
In a recent InfoTrends survey called The Future of Office Printing, over 750 respondents provided insights to their printing behaviors. Two-thirds said their company has taken steps to remove, simplify or automate document related processes. Traditional office environments are still generating the most print volume and almost 40% said less than one quarter of their business content remains on paper. What are the others doing to manage the future of printing effectively?
Enter SBB, the new acronym in town.
“Customers’ buying habits are quickly switching to an “everything-as-a-service” preference and the SBB Road Shows have been designed to help office equipment dealers to take advantage of that.” stated West McDonald, Vice President at Print Audit. “The seat-based methodology will enable office equipment dealers to more easily layer on additional services like Managed I.T., Telephony and Cloud. Dealers are diversifying in greater and greater numbers and a seat-based platform allows them to start with what they know and gets them in position to more easily adopt other offerings on a unified billing platform.”
Check out the website to learn more at http://www.sbbroadshow.com
