Pinnacle – a Print Management Case Study

Print Dashboards provide print services provider, Pinnacle, with an in-depth, real-time, holistic view of their entire Managed Print Services business.

Experts in Document and Print Management for Xerox

Cardiff based Pinnacle Office Solutions are a Xerox Gold Partner. They supply an extensive range of energy efficient Xerox hardware, integrated document and print management software for Xerox and Managed Print Services; all designed to speed up their clients’ document processing workload and improve efficiency.

Managed Print Services is a Strong Growth Area

Printing costs can easily absorb 3% of an organisations annual spend, from maintaining hardware to the cost of ink, these expenses soon add up. Pinnacle report that more of their clients are choosing to outsource the handling of their day-to-day print operations and management of their print and document infrastructure. Adopting a Managed Print Services (MPS) print model, which can cut print and copy costs by as much as 30%. The reporting tools allow Pinnacle to streamline, optimize and manage remote output devices for maximum efficiency and achieve substantial savings on print and copy costs.

The Problem

Every month, Pinnacle’s Account Managers prepare a report for each of their MPS clients. The report provides customers with last month’s statistics activity, individual device usage, volumes of print etc. As well as accrued information up to that point in the customer’s financial year.

Reporting monthly MPS activity and usage to customers was taking up ever increasing amounts of Account Managers’ time, detracting them from sales. Collecting all this data from disparate systems and collating it to produce a single, paper based, bound client report took on average, five or six hours a month. In some cases, Account Managers would need to put together a 98-page monthly report. The collective report preparation time was coming in at a staggering 16 working days a month.

Martyn Williams, Group Technical Director at Pinnacle wanted to improve MPS reporting so that Account Managers would have more time to focus on customer service and new business opportunities.

The Solution

As a ProcessFlows Channel Partner and reseller, Pinnacle was well informed about ProcessFlows business software and services. Martyn Williams was quick to realise the potential of the Dashboard, beyond just another value-added sales opportunity.

Managed Print Service Dashboard is a real-time user interface which, once integrated with any back office system, can mine data across multiple systems and then graphically present the data for analysis in a dashboard format, which is easily understood by everyone.

Martyn comments that the dashboards were quick and easy to set up and within a day they were able to produce working dashboards and immediately increase efficiency.

Remote Access

At any time, clients can log-on remotely to their MPS account. Using Dashboard tools, they can drill down through their print data (as far as department level), assimilate it and view information on volume of colour vs. black and white print usage, productivity over a particular period and downtime to name but a few.

Access to an export file allows clients to easily extract the data and import it into their line of business system.

Financial Dashboards

Having successfully proved the benefits of using Dashboards, Pinnacle is now using Dashboards to help manage and report their Finance & Accounting outsourcing services.

Dashboards Help Win New Business
Martyn explains how Dashboards are helping them win new MPS business,

“Because we can provide clients with such a wealth of detailed information and they can access it themselves online, anytime, it’s setting us apart from our competitors. Customers appreciate that they no longer have to trawl through a lengthy report to find the information they want; visual information can be pulled up onto their screen in seconds and understood almost as quickly.”

Managed Print Services Dashboard have helped Pinnacle to streamline their reporting and reclaim time; allowing them to redistribute valuable resource and focus on customer service and new business opportunities.