Concept: Living organism, acorn grows to a tree.
Cameron Arnold from Woodbank Office Solutions talks about achieving full value from your office equipment by utilising its full range of functions.
MULTI-FUNCTIONAL DEVICE.
Where is the value in just using it for cost effective print? More often than not, a client will ask “how cheaply can you provide this photocopier?” Where is the value in what we do when this is the case? This becomes a bidding war and a race to the bottom slowly killing the good Managed Print Services providers. The value of print isn’t in how cheap the cost per page rate can get, it’s what you do with that print next!
When we sit down with our clients, it shouldn’t be a case of understanding how we can find different angles to pitch a cheaper service to win business; it should be a question of looking to understand what the client is printing, what they are doing with that printed document and other documents they have in the organisation; where that document goes next and where that document needs to be in the years to come. The real question is, ‘where do you want your business to be in 5 years time?’
If the answer isn’t growth and an increase in profit, then why are you in business?
You started of your business planting an idea and then trying to find a way to bring in the finance to keep it growing; you planted a seed that will hopefully grow. Very few businesses get the chance to grown in a open field with all the share of nutrients and sunlight from their surroundings, most have to find a way to cope in a forest of bigger trees already taking their share of nutrients and blocking out a lot of sunlight. The only way for that seed to survive is to grow towards the light by changing shape and direction, it evolves! It internally finds a way to utilise the nutrients and sunlight at its disposal to accelerate its growth in the right direction. For a business, this comes down to the people and the internal practices.
For a business to utilise its nutrients and sunlight, it tends to invest them in training their staff in different concepts and motivating them with rewards for completing tasks. How many businesses have invested in making these concepts easier for their staff and the tasks easier and quicker to complete? Most of the time spent throughout projects and tasks is trying to find the right information or processing information to provide results, why make it so laborious?
Whilst writing this, one of my friends has pulled out of drinks due to the fact he can’t find the right paperwork. Posed the question as to why and his response was someone had scanned the document into the system but hadn’t filed it correctly with the right search terms for their system, but the winning comment was “the best part is, they have shredded the original document!” Why wasn’t it scanned in as a searchable pdf? Would it have been easier if there had been software to correctly process the document so it had the appropriate and right metadata against the document and it was stored in the right location? Could he have joined us for drinks if this was the case instead of working on a Sunday?
When we work with clients, we should look to understand as much as possible about what they want to achieve over the next 5 years, and further, so we can help them develop the right solution. This right solution will help them naturally grow from within while making sure that their staff can utilise that solution to work more intelligently, faster and not have to cancel on drinks.
Smarter print, data capture and document management can be the catalyst that helps their organisation blossom amongst that original forest.
www.woodbankoffice.co.uk