Managed Print Services

Many of you have heard of Managed Print Services, or MPS but I would guess that many of you have not thought about the effect that MPS will have on your business in the near future.

As a way of providing you with a frame of reference for MPS in general, take a look at the graphic above. It’s from the research firm, Photizo Group, and helps explain important aspects of the future of MPS.

Things to keep in mind:

• First, the overall market for professional print services isn’t projected to grow that much in the coming years.
• Second, while the market isn’t likely to grow as a whole, it will be changing dramatically. Over the next four years, your customers will be aggressively converting from buying and managing their own printers, to outsourcing all print services through MPS. How aggressively is the market likely to convert? The graph above shows that $50 billion of the traditional print services market will be moving to MPS by 2013!
• Third, this means that your share of the market will come under attack from other print providers, especially equipment manufacturers and equipment resellers who will tell your customers, “Hey, we do all your other printing, why don’t we throw in your wide-format work, too?”
• Fourth, wide-format printing is only a small part of this overall market, so even though the market isn’t growing, your share of the print market can increase dramatically by pursuing MPS. Why? Because for every wide-format printer in a typical office, there are frequently 10 additional small format or multi-function devices!

The observations above go a long way in answering at least two fundamental questions about your strategic direction with regard to MPS:

Q: Why should you consider pursuing MPS?
A: The overall print services market isn’t projected to grow aggressively. As such, you need to defend the market share you have, and grow aggressively inside the overall market. You can do this by converting the FM business you have to MPS, and leveraging your strengths to capture new business through your MPS offering.
Q: Why is there such a sense of urgency on MPS?
A: The conversion of the market is happening fast — $50 billion of converted business is projected in less than four years. If you don’t capture this business, someone else will take it from you.

* At its simplest, MPS is managing hard copy device fleets (copiers, printers, multifunction devices, and fax machines) in a unified fashion. Essentially, this means a client outsources ALL of their printing resources to you – you run their on-site printing, off-site printing and document management & storage.

Thanks............Shaun