Managing Toners Stock in the Field

[mloudy]

Re: Managing Toners Stock in the Field

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Here is what email alerts and print fleet software will not catch, stupidity.

Walked by the cart in the warehouse where "empties" are placed before we ship them back to Lexmark. Pulled these out of the box they were in and by feeling the weight of one of them I knew it didn't have an empty toner in it. Sure enough if you look at the toner on the right it has never even been opened. We can put all kinds of safegaurds in place but people will always find a way to bypass them with stupidity. Fortunetly $125 goes back on the shelf and not back to Lexmark. I shake my head a lot at work every day.

[mloudy]

Re: Managing Toners Stock in the Field

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In an effort to stop customers from trying to fix light copies and prints by swaping out toners I had these stickers made. They go on all new equipment and techs carry a roll with them to put on existing equipment. $276 for 2,000 labels. Save a couple toners and they are paid for.

[Gina82]

Re: Managing Toners Stock in the Field

Our small dealership kind of does a 50/50 with FM Audit. About 50% of our customers are on the web audit, and those do not get an extra toner for the shelf. We set the limit for 15%. Once that limit is reached, FM Audit gives you an estimated end of life for toner. Also FM Audit shows when toner has been replaced in the past and at what percent. We like it.

The other 50% call into the office. We keep a manual record of meter reads with each contract customer in our toner book. I know that sounds like a lot of work, but it actually isn't. I can pull this binder at any time and pull any contract customer, it shows me about how often they receive toner and their approximate copies between toner. We also monitor meter reads. If a toner is supposed to get 24K, and the customer is only get half. We inform the customer, and if this is not corrected, we correct the service agreement accordingly. Depending on the account and their track record with toner, a few out of town accounts are allowed to keep an extra toner. Especially high volume accounts...

Never leave toner at schools was a hard one to pull off, but we hardly leave extra toner at any school, since the turnover rate is so high in the office. But techs also check the machine and note on workorder if a certain account is getting low and don't mind calling and letting them know I'm sending them one. Since 50% call into office for toner, I can knock out toner replacement for light copies or copy quality issues. The other 50% only get toner when FM Audit calls for it and has to call in for service calls. We also keep toner in stock and monitor the quantity that we keep pretty often and adjust ordering when machines start to get older.

This works pretty well for us.

[jamesdrago]

Re: Managing Toners Stock in the Field

As far as I know the ERDS sytem work for prior and low off the copiers we have done a program to auto notified us by the email it sends out.