If you’re considering moving your organisation onto a managed print services contract, we thought it might be helpful to talk you through how the quotation process works and what is involved in ensuring you get a suitable agreement for your business.

The first stage we always take our clients through at Parallel is a comprehensive audit of your current situation – we will consider all the following: –

  1. Number of employees
  2. Number of office/sites
  3. Where are these sites located?
  4. What hardware do you currently have?
  5. What print requirements do different departments need?
  6. Whether you have or need a print room within your organisation

Once we have an understanding of your requirements, we will look at your current units, costs and utilisation – this is an essential step as it will help us to see if there are any departments where print spending is abnormally high or any areas where teams would benefit from machines that will offer different functionality, e.g. your sales department may not need access to a costly colour printer as a mono may be both more cost and time efficient.

From here, we provide a comprehensive quotation that will show you the print volumes we have calculated you require and the units we recommend for each area of your business – we are very consultative in our approach and are happy to explain any part of our contract or pricing with you – if you want to make any changes, we can integrate these. We will continue to review the quotation until you are happy with the solution offered.

A Managed Print Service will generally have two specific components – the initial acquisition costs for the hardware and the operating costs for the contract’s lifetime.

Parallel will put forward a contract proposal that includes the new equipment cost via one of our finance partners and the managed print costs we provide.

The MPS Quote will cover the following: –

  1. Consumables for the units (toners, drums, waste kits etc.) will be automatically ordered by our monitoring software and delivered to the correct location as needed.
  1. Service, maintenance and parts when machines experience issues, including our industry-leading Printanista software that provides remote monitoring and fixes where applicable
  1. Cost Per Page price – this is calculated depending on the units you have and the functionality they offer, e.g., Colour CPP will be higher than mono.

You will then receive an invoice based on the agreed figures in the initial contract, showing why the print audit is so important. In addition, if you have exceeded your contract page amount, we will bill for an additional printing that has been used.

Now, this is where Parallel stands out with their transparency values – at the point of billing, we will arrange a review with you to ensure that your current levels are right for your business – our many years of experience in the space will tell us if we need to adjust anything or if a department may benefit from a different unit to help control the costs.

We even tell customers that they are underutilising their contracts. If we see this happening regularly, we will suggest they reduce their monthly payments so they are not wasting money on their print operation.

Notably, at any time, we can provide accurate information to our customers to show their current requirements are right for their business, and our incredible account management team keep a close eye on all our contracts to ensure our customers remain happy with the service they receive.

We want lasting relationships because of excellent service levels and satisfaction.

Our approach to Managed Print Services is shaking up an industry that has traditionally not been known for its clarity and is seeing us win some big contracts as we can offer flexibility and data-driven decisions that ensure our customers are getting the most both operationally and financially out of their agreements.

The Parallel team have over 20 years of experience in Managed Print Services, and we would love to show you how we differentiate ourselves from other providers- if you’d like to understand more about how our contracts work, please message us today.