Scanning...

[mansart]

I'm curious how others are addressing the following situation.....

Customer with service contract with minimum volume coverage, yet they are scanning 20-25K per month.

Who out there has a safety net for this? Who out charges for scans?

Any feed back appreciated. TIA

[slimslob]

Re: Scanning...

I don't know what manufacturers you sell/service but with Ricoh there were reports that could be printed that gave more information than the basic countered. In addition to copies, prints and and total pages but also sent fax pages scanned, pages scanned to folder and email. Those numbers can then be used to calculate the increased costs to replace feeder parts more frequently. You can then discuss the problem with the customer and come up with a mutually agreeable adjusted maintenance contract.

[mansart]

Re: Scanning...

"Sharp" guy here....


Yes will print more reports than you can possibly use. We will address with client but was just curious if others were billing for scanning yet.

Thanks

[sandmanmac]

Re: Scanning...

( I'm a Ricoh Guy)
I run a very simple one person operation here, and only a small handful of customers that this situation applies to.
I have a quarterly minimum that I charge which is clearly stated on my agreement if their output isn't high enough. I tell them straight up that otherwise it's simply not worth it for me, and they can pay time and materials if they want

[srvctec]

Re: Scanning...

We don't charge extra for out of the norm scans. It's difficult enough to get just the copy counts from people, let alone scan counts (even though that's super easy on KM machines). We have a few customers that have far more scans than they do total count on the machine. For example, a machine with around 500K and scans of about 700K.

[tsbservice]

Re: Scanning...

This is very unexplored teritory area and I have not found one valid solution till now.
Nowadays customers moves more and more towards scanning and electronic documents instead of hard copies.
That leave us in contract cases with many open questions. The price of Doc feed rolls alone isn't biggest problem imho, but the cr.p originals the put through DF and operator errors will cost much more in service labour when DFs are heavy used. I constantly stress on that fact but sales people seems tend to forget about that when it comes to deal.

[Bix]

Re: Scanning...

We are pioneering the provision of cloud services for scans. Or rather, it is trying to justify the extra price for the scans, offering a service that will hardly use but that will cover the costs of maintaining the rollers.

[KenB]

Re: Scanning...

This is FAR from a new issue; it's been out there for years now, and is gaining momentum.

The problem is that everyone wants to charge for excessive scans, but are more afraid of losing customers and revenue if they are one of the first to do so.

Until our industry finds some solidarity and we all start charging, nobody wants to be among the first to take the proverbial plunge.

[diedux]

Re: Scanning...

This is FAR from a new issue; it's been out there for years now, and is gaining momentum.

The problem is that everyone wants to charge for excessive scans, but are more afraid of losing customers and revenue if they are one of the first to do so.

Until our industry finds some solidarity and we all start charging, nobody wants to be among the first to take the proverbial plunge.

Could not agree more. Nobody wants/dare to charge "plain" scanning. My approach to this is to add value to a scanning process. In example OCR, flexible, intuitive scan workflows, help with integration to DMS, etc.

[KenB]

Re: Scanning...

Could not agree more. Nobody wants/dare to charge "plain" scanning. My approach to this is to add value to a scanning process. In example OCR, flexible, intuitive scan workflows, help with integration to DMS, etc.

Even that can be a bit tricky.

About 3 or 4 years ago, I had a customer with 2 Ricoh MP C4502s (I think) with eCopy ShareScan.

eCopy worked great, and did all the things is was supposed to: OCRing, file naming, and sending to a SAN for storage. All good there.

The issue was that the customer had many thousands of documents to scan. They were tearing up the doc feeders at an alarming rate. They had a lot of down time with feeder issues. Keeping those 2 machines running properly eroded any profit that came from them; they printed only 20 or 30 pages per day.

Ultimately, we sold them 2 Fujitsu scanners, which buzzed along happily with the high volume. They were connected to the ScanStations via USB.

In this case, Sales totally whiffed when it came to determining what the number of pages they had to scan would be.