The company is midway through executing on a plan to create distribution and channel efficiencies, broaden its product reach, and get closer to its customers through just a handful of distributor channels across all regions.
In Europe in January 2006, Xerox started to consolidate its 49 country-based tier-one distributors serving around 8,000 resellers, and has since concentrated on serving its three main regional distributors of Scribona, Tech Data, and Ingram. General manager for Xerox UK, Darren Cassidy said the move had proved to be an enabler for growth, and helped lower overall inventory and improve product lead times to between 24 and 48 hours.
The introduction of the PagePack fixed-price service contract is another breakthrough area for us, offering partners a means of delivering services based on a fully inclusive controlled and predictable cost across our MFP range, he said. Resellers will no longer have to fight for a piece of the customer’s consumables spend every year, but instead be able to deliver a predictable monthly or quarterly bill.
PagePack includes all supplies and printer consumables, excluding paper, and will be available for a range of color and mono printers, and most multi-function peripherals.
Xerox will charge out the service according to a standard price per page to its partners. Unlike its competitors, where the unit print charge normally rises as the average print coverage on a page increases, with PagePack it is Xerox and not the reseller that takes the risk on high print coverage as the service is costed out at a flat-page rate for each printer covered by the scheme.
The new contract scheme will only apply to newly installed machines, and service providers will not be able to retrofit the contract across an existing Xerox printer estate.
Xerox is making a case for the introduction of a couple of new workgroup models, as being the first time a color laser multi-function unit has been brought to market that combines the characteristics of a departmental mono machine with the print capabilities more usually associated with the high-end machines typically found in creative departments.
The Xerox WorkCentre 7655 and 7665 models will operate at around 60 to 70 pages a minute for black and white, and pump out around 30 pages a minute of color. The units have the fastest scan speeds in their class, the vendor also claimed.
Mark Boyt, European product manager said the departmental space had so far lacked productive color devices that were capable of dealing both with the everyday heavy-duty mono jobs and also the quality demands of high specification color runs. It’s a whole new space we’ll be operating in, he said.
The printer vendor also announced a series of its own and some new partner software offerings that help customers incorporate printer processes into mainstream business applications. Launching in the next few days are products from Equitrac, X-Solutions, and DocuShare, and covering products for importing scans into popular office accounting programs like those from Great Plains or Sage, print tracking and cost-control software, and new content and document-management applications.
