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September 19, 2008
Stop Buying Hardware You Do Not Need
We are living and operating in a very challenging economic and business environment. Your customers have very tight capital and operating budgets. This creates an opportunity for you.
Now is the time to focus on operational excellence and increasing the return on assets (ROA) for your customers. And, you do not do this by throwing away all of imaging devices your customers own today or every 3 years.
Manufacturers and many resellers want to manufacture and sell end users more products. They want the technology refresh period to be short so that end users need to lease or purchase more equipment. And, some manufacturers of imaging products design the products to have a useful life of only 3 to 5 years to force a refresh. Manufacturers of imaging equipment are not in the business of helping you or encouraging you to improve your customer’s return on assets by extending useful life of their imaging device asset base.
When you assess your customer’s imaging device asset base, you need to look at more than just the incremental cost per page of a printer at $.015 per page versus a copier at $.008 per page. If they own 5 printers and have to lease a new copier to replace the 5 printers, the real cost per page of the copier is closer to $.04 per page versus $.015 per page for the printers they already own.
Your customers have a large and sometimes hidden valuable asset base. A school system with 500 printers with an average purchase cost of $1,000 each has a $500,000 asset. This is an asset we need to leverage and extend the useful life through good management.
You can quickly observe that high maintenance imaging assets have a short useful life, resulting in a low return on that asset. Low maintenance imaging devices have a long useful life and a high return on asset. And, just like your car, if you do preventive maintenance, it will last longer and give you better gas mileage.
Therefore, your customers should invest in high quality imaging devices with long useful lives and put in place effective asset management programs to extend their useful life and increase their return on those assets.
By working with your customers to improve their return on assets, you will help them build a strong balance sheet and optimize their capital budgets. This will help to establish your legitimacy as a trusted advisor and when they need equipment they will talk to you first.
Posted by jfall at September 19, 2008 01:04 PM
