As we put a wrap on our June state of the industry focus on the future office/smart office platform, we’ve asked our dealer panel to provide their views on what tomorrow may hold for their product and service portfolio.
A dealership such as DOCUmation is quite methodical when adding a new offering to its menu, and with good reason. Any new products need to meet two criteria: one, it must definitely fill a need for customers. The dealer, with its headquarters in San Antonio, does not subscribe to the “me, too” philosophy; any new offering must serve a bona fide purpose for a strong percentage of clients, as opposed to a niche offering.
A second criteria is the quality of the partner offering the product. DOCUmation is fully confident in the technology and support offered by Ricoh, which in turn enables the dealer to provide the exceptional service its clients are accustomed to receiving.
Dealer Approved
“We are staying in a holding pattern until we are
However, when Ricoh calls, Woolfolk is definitely listening. “I’m hoping they will call to say they have something really cool,” he said. “Their track record is flawless with us at this point. We’ll keep selling it.”
While Woodhull LLC feels it is fairly current with all of the primary future office technologies, there are subsets the Springboro, Ohio-headquartered firm is exploring. Marketing Manager Robert Woodhull notes the dealer has some interest in 3D scanners, which has applications for a number of its key customer verticals, including manufacturing.
“What we’re really seeing is the evolution of the multifunction device, with software solutions offered by the manufacturers themselves,” Woodhull added. “This makes for easier installations and training is more seamless, because they’re already used to those user interfaces. But nothing in my mind jumps at me as a must-add in the next two years.”
Subscription-based Billing
Plus Inc., the pride of Greenville, South Carolina, is not eyeing any future technologies at the moment per se, but is embracing the era of subscription services. President David Carson notes how the millennial generation is hard wired into subscription-based services, with the mobile phone at its genesis.
“We’re seeing a big migration in our thought process of subscription-based services with a flat rate,” Carson remarked. “Even with printers: 10,000 pages per month copiers, 5,000 color pages a month, 5,000 black. It costs you $500 a month and it covers everything. That’s kind of a big focus for us.”
The challenge comes with compensation plans for sales reps, he added. Carson opposes the traditional method of compensating reps for selling copiers that generate a high volume of clicks.
“It’s sometimes difficult to get the reps to concentrate on the smaller products with the subscriptions. The only way you’re really going to do that is to make sure you get them part of that recurring revenue on a regular basis,” he said. “We’ve got to start looking at models that compensate them more on monthly revenues that those things are generating in order to compensate for the loss of selling copiers and printers. That’s going to gradually go away.”
Expanding Accessibility
Jon Evans, director of solutions architecture for Impact, believes their offerings will continue to expand, as certain technologies have financial barriers to entry that make it cost-prohibitive for the SMB market to purchase and implement on its own. This has been evident through the years with enterprise content and document management, capture and business process management (to name a few) debuting as Fortune 100 technology. But as the market evolved and R&D costs were covered for the manufacturers, the technology was made available on different licensing models. Impact pounced on that opportunity and took it to their market.
“We have no reason to believe this won’t repeat itself with technologies such as AI integration into BPA, RPA and custom applications,” Evans said. “More accessibility through API to services at Google and Microsoft will ultimately make their way into custom apps built in rapid deployment models. There will be more attended RPA solutions that create digital co-workers, assisting humans in data process and entry, reporting, and all manner of repetitive non-cognitive tasks. For ERP, we are looking to expand our portfolio to fit other verticals like healthcare and logistics, eventually offering HRIS, CRM and TMS systems.
“We are constantly watching the evolution of AI, which will likely expand exponentially in the next two to five years. Soon enough, we’ll start looking at the cognitive processes to identify how to offload those to smarter, more nimble next-level solutions. We are very excited for the future, both near and far.”
LDI Color ToolBox of New York City expects to grow and verticalize some of its more esoteric technologies to make them more appealing to its customer base. “In each client engagement, we learn more about how our customers want to adapt and secure the technology for uses in different areas of their business,” said Brian Gertler, senior vice president. “It also informs us on the areas to ramp up to provide the appropriate levels of support.”
