Ordering toner and other supplies based on actual behaviour patterns are needed to ensure agreed uptime and effective cost management.
Ordering a toner at 20% is a typical alert configuration many print dealers use today. If you have a printer with a high print volume, you might have yet another alert profile with 50%. You could even have an alert profile with 10% for the printers with low usage.
Those different trigger levels indicate a need not to send supplies too early or too late. The business need is there, and printer dealers have used this method to solve this problem.
But situations change constantly, and a device suitable for the 50% alert profile might need to be on the 10% profile in some periods.
How to manage that without manually analyzing the volumes and guessing if it should be on profile 1 or 2? You don't; Imagine having +1000 devices to manage? Manual analysis would take so much time.
What does that mean for printer dealers?
Many print dealers struggle with duplicate supply orderings which get delayed on a daily basis. This problem is expensive and time-consuming.
The solution is to work with data-driven software, with the capabilities of analyzing data and estimating "life-left" that you can use in your daily planning.
The goal is to have a digital assistant working for you 24/7/365, analyzing numbers and always giving you updated trends and estimations based on actual behaviour.
It means getting a lot of printer data every day in our industry. At 3manager, we have decided to get this as frequent as down to every 15 minutes. This amount of data gives us the ability to understand the behaviour of the toner and supplies usage in detail. Our ability to avoid duplicate orderings caused by shaken toner cartridges and inaccurate printer data is excellent.
Elements needed to achieve this goal:
Data quality
Use constant validation of printer data to avoid inaccurate data for supply ordering.
Automation
Setting up the rules for optimal ordering time and using cleaned data and behaviour based trends to find optimal ordering time.
Intelligence
Reduce costs and time usage and optimize logistics with intelligent ordering streamlining orders to send supplies in bulk rather than individually and more frequent.
Conclusion :
To avoid cost running out of control, you need good clean data you can trust and software that can process it, put your supply ordering into automation that adapts to the client's needs.
Want to know more?
If you want to learn how 3manager MPS software can help with these challenges, don't hesitate to book us for a demo and talk about our supplies data management and ordering options.