KYOCERA : EDGES OUT THE COMPETITION

[Anonymous]

Edge Out The Competition
Discover Printing Cost Savings With Kyocera TCO Optimizer
Today’s capital and IT equipment markets are driven by price and costs as never before. Salespeople need good tools to help them sell into such situations, and Kyocera Mita America has put together a real gem. The Kyocera TCO Optimizer is a .NET-based program that goes out and discovers all the networked printers it can find from the Windows machine upon which it’s been installed and then reports back on what it discovers. Furthermore, the software can draw on a database of known costs related to all the printers it recognizes and provide average cost-per-page output for both color and monochrome printer models.
The program begins with an initial period of discovery once a potential customer obtains a copy from an authorized Kyocera dealer or a salesperson installs the program with the customer’s consent. According to Victor Jacksier, software product manager, it’s typical to leave the software running for up to two weeks in larger enterprises where large numbers of print devices are typically attached all around sizable networks at multiple sites on corporate networks.|
Once the discovery phase is complete, the program is incredibly easy to operate. Users simply navigate across the various tabs at the top of the program window, starting with Initial Discovery and working from left to right until they produce a report that estimates potential savings possible. The basic idea is to decide how many printers will be upgraded or switched from competitive models to equivalent Kyocera models and then run some numbers on costs involved and savings realized. The bottom line is demonstrated in the illustration, taken from a PowerPoint presentation automatically generated by the program. It illustrates savings of $193,918 over a 36-month period, after switching from a mixed bag of 209 competitor units to a like number of Kyocera units.
The real value of the program, according to salesperson Dave Brouwer of Coast Copy, is “that customers often don’t realize what each of their print devices can do, nor how much the per-page output cost is for each one.” By gathering up all this data on their customer’s behalf, the tool does a great job of documenting current printing costs. By comparing those costs to what equivalent Kyocera models can do with the same print volumes and loads, it creates abundant sales opportunities.
Understanding Kyocera competition in this situation is stunningly obvious: They are identified in the demo program, which lists printers from Canon, HP, Lexmark, IBM, Ricoh, Xerox, and “Others.” But Jacksier underscores the company’s coup with this tool when he explains that “TCO Optimizer is designed to do something that other vendors currently do not do or do not offer.” He also goes on to say this tool gives those who sell Kyocera printers in competitive situations a nearly unbeatable edge. 

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March 7, 2006 at 11:08 AM