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.
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."