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Buying Printers! Are you Nuts?

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DQI Bureau
New Update

WeP Peripherals plans to change the way Indian businesses manage their

printing needs. The company, formerly known as Wipro ePeripherals, is rolling

out an ambitious plan to open over 10,000 printing centers over the next three

years. This is a part of an initiative that the company calls its very own BPO

initiative and according to WeP will require an initial investment of Rs 80-100

crore. The ‘BPO’ initiative has two components to it–the onsite and

offshore component.

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Onsite component



The company launched its onsite component called the Print and Save scheme

nearly a year-and-a-half ago. Under this scheme WeP installs its own printers in

corporate offices who then pay per use. That is, the customer does not buy

either the printer nor does he have to invest in consumables. He pays for the

number of pages he prints. "The idea of this scheme was to free customers

from the hassles of buying printers, product obsolescence, toner costs and

maintenance," says S Raghavendra Prakash, chief marketing officer of WeP

Peripherals services division. While WeP insists this leads to considerable cost

savings, it would not quantify the savings or specify exactly how they are

calculated. WeP says it has received a good response to the Print and Save

scheme and already has more than 250 live customers today, each of them with 3-4

installed sites each. Some of its large customers include IDBI, ICICI and The

Taj group. According to Prakash, IDBI alone has 25 printer installations

nationwide.

Offsite component



The offsite component of this initiative is the opening of printing centers

that will cater to people with occasional but specific printing needs. These

would either be one-off customers or SMEs that do not have enough volumes to

require a printer on the premises. The company has opened its first printing

center in Bangalore and hopes to open 10 more in the coming year in Bangalore,

Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Kolkata. "The WeP

printing centers will offer customers access to specialized non-regular printing

jobs without any infrastructure investments. Customers can also use remote

printing and need not come physically to print," says Prakash.

Will it work?



Going by precedent–it may. While outsourced printing is a relatively new

concept in India, it is not a new phenomenon in the US. Kinkos, a Dallas based

‘document-printing services’ provider, started off as "copy shop"

in the early 70s for individual users and small businesses, which could not

afford or access printers. Today, the company boasts of a network of 1,100 ‘digitally

connected locations’. In fact, in November 2002, Kinkos tied up with Microsoft

to launch a new service called "File, Print…Kinkos" service.

But there are considerable differences between Kinkos and WeP’s offering.

Firstly, Kinkos offers a whole lot of services like finishing and presentation

services, Internet access, videoconferencing, facilities management, web-based

printing, and document management solutions whereas WeP is more focused on

printing alone. Secondly, WeP’s initiative has an onsite angle to it. Either

way, the proof of this pudding will really be in the eating. For one, WeP itself

acknowledges that it meets a lot of resistancefrom customers on the pay per use

model. For another, even with a franchisee model, 10,000 centers in the next

three years sounds a tad ambitious. At the moment however WeP is grappling with

the logistics. As Prakash says, "The operational details are quite

challenging. Three centers a quarter, across ten cities and all of them up and

running 24x7 is a daunting task. We are also talking about a fairly nascent

technology that involves remote printing and that in itself is very

challenging."

TV Mahalingam

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