Accurate Pay-per-Use Invoicing for Copiers

In today's copier business you no longer sell machines, but you sell service; including a lease for the actual machine, advice on what the best machine is for the business of your customer, the delivery of supplies and maintenance. And that in a multi-year contract covering all copiers and printers of that customer against the lowest price per page.

From an operations perspective you send a monthly invoice, you perform corrective maintenance if a machine has a malfunction, you perform preventive maintenance and you ship supplies. If you were to have timely and accurate counter-readings of all those machines you could see a shift from the left column to the right column in the following table:

Before	After
Monthly estimated invoice & quarterly corrections	Actual ‘zero-fault’ invoices
Reactive maintenance & penalties for interrupts	Proactive & optimised maintenance-planning
Supplies ‘On Demand’ & uncontrolled stock	Pro-active supply & stock (abuse) control
Estimated usage Patterns	Actual usage patterns & optimization of hardware

Probably you already have an e-services platform, where customers can request service visits, order supplies and enter their counter-readings. But every month your staff is making an educated guess to what this months reading should be, and as a result, when the correct figure does arrive you need to send a correction. With the Smart-Link™ solution you will no longer need to worry about harassing your customers with reading the copiers counters, as this information will be the key driver to take control of the situation. It will also give you some tangible benefits:

New	Gain
Actual ‘zero-fault’ invoices	x FTE on credit notes
Proactive & optimised maintenance-planning	95% less penalties, x FTE by better utilisation
Pro-active supply & stock (abuse) control	10% less 'waste', 5% less stock abuse
Actual usage patterns & optimization of hardware	~ € 1,00 per machine-month for increased service level

One of the key challenges in introducing a solution in the copier market is the ease of installation, and this is where the self-configuring abilities of the Smart-Link™ field module come into play; the module is simply connected to the machine by plugging it into the Ethernet (LAN) connector and reconnecting the original LAN wire to the field module. The field module is invisible to the Local Area Network, but is capable of communicating with the copier. When it discovers the appropriate copier settings, it will configure itself accordingly. Rolling out the Smart-Link™ solution is therefore a matter of shipping the field modules to the customer site with a request to execute this simple installation.

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