MPS software provider’s seventh report on the compliancy levels of current printers and MFPs includes “more models from more manufacturers”.
The report, titled MPS Compliant – Analysis of printer/copier models, is the seventh of its kind to be published by Nubeprint, with the first released in 2011. Since then, the company said that the number of printer models included in the report “has multiplied by more than four” and the “diversity of manufacturers of printers and copiers has increased by 240 percent”.
The report begins with Nubeprint noting how the industry’s vision of MPS has shifted angle, as “while cost-per-page used to be the goal, now the objective is to control and reduce costs at all levels”; with cost-per-page contracts “now analysed in terms of real margins generated and ‘lean’ opportunity”. However, the company added that cost-per-page contracts are still used but “controlling and reducing the costs of the contract” is increasingly important.
Moving to the compliance analysis, the report looked at the general device population offered by the current market using 2,100 devices selected from the most commonly found on the market, with manufacturers Printronix and Source Technologies new additions to the study. The devices were classified into six different types: monochrome printers, colour printers, monochrome MFPs, colour MFP, large-format printers (LFPs), and ribbon printers.
The statistics show that 59 percent of the population consists of MFPs, while 36 percent are printers, four percent are LFPs and one percent are ribbon printers. In addition, 44 percent of the market consists of colour devices, meaning 56 percent are monochrome (excluding LFP and ribbon printers). In terms of vendors, HP takes up the largest share of the population, followed by Ricoh and Canon.
With this analysed, the report moves on to look at the compliancy levels of the population, finding that 36 percent of all models are fully compliant, while 31 percent have “major limitations” and three percent are not compliant at all. This three percent has remained “pretty stable” as the number of models analysed has grown. A further finding was that 90 percent of vendors carry models that are either not MPS compliant and/or show relevant compliance issues.
Overall, 64 percent of the models analysed “expose the MPS service provider to an elevated risk that translates in higher cost, lack of cost control and unexpected losses”; with LFP and ribbon printers being the biggest contributors to non-compliant MPS printers with 68 percent and 76 percent of devices respectively being non-compliant or reporting major issues.
Nubeprint drew from its findings that 61 percent of models “require an advanced MPS management technology to compensate for their lack of capability in MPS”, and so the majority of the models analysed “expose the MPS service provider to risks in terms of the quality of the service, profitability of the business and therefore competitiveness”.
The relationship between device type and compliancy was also explored by the report, which found that single-function printers are the most MPS compliant, with around 40 percent being MPS ready; compared to 27 percent of colour and mono MFPs. Colour devices – both MFP and printers – generally have higher levels of compliance, with just 16 percent indicating major limitations; while mono MFPs showed the worst level of compliance as 52 percent of devices showed major issues. In general, 45 percent of mono printers and copiers were found to have major issues in MPS.
Finally, the report looked at how different manufacturers fair when it comes to MPS compliancy, with the market found to be “very heterogeneous” as the majority of vendors reported a “plurality of compliance that depends on the model”. However, the graphs show that Pantum and Generic have the most compliant devices at 100 percent, followed by Riso, OKI, Sagem and UTAX. The manufacturers with the least compliant devices meanwhile are Sato and Intermec, both of which have no MPS compliant devices; with Zebra, Canon, Oce and TSC all reporting low compliancy levels of 20 percent or below.
You can read about the last MPS Compliant report from Nubeprint in the feature ‘MPS: Where does the aftermarket stand?’ in issue 256 of The Recycler.