Specialist
Managed Print Service level agreements: here is what you should consider.
A good Service Level Agreement or as it’s commonly known, an SLA, should help your company by protecting it against unfair or negligent business practices. For example, with a Managed Print Service contract this could mean poor response times or an inability to solve a problem quickly in order to keep your business running smoothly.
When choosing any new supplier, when creating any RFP, RFT or brief, you need to be very clear at the outset what your expectations are, how you will evaluate the responses to your request for a quotation and ultimately how you will judge success. A comprehensive Request for Proposal will have many questions, and a section of this, will and should revolve around service and service delivery.
So why is this important? Well, it’s ultimately about ensuring that your MPS provider can support your business and keep it up and running. As we like to call it; the five 9s or 99.999% uptime.
We suggest the following points are mission critical for any business:
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Response Times
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Engineer Capability and Availability
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Uptime
1.Response Times
You need to understand what the process is for your Managed Print Service provider when something goes wrong with your printer or device. Any MPS supplier worth their salt will be acutely aware of how important your printer, MFD and office equipment is to your business running smoothly. Questions to ask include:
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How do you log a request?
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What’s the quickest solution? By phone, by email, via a portal?
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What are the response times when a service call is logged? Be sure to understand any geographical implications around response times.
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What information should be provided when logging a service call?
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What happens when the service issue is logged? What’s the next step?
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Ask the supplier to define first-time fix and what their percentage level is of first-time fixes. The last thing you need is for a technician to come out, not be able to fix the problem and then to have to return with parts and leave you without a working device.
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What is the average time to resolution?
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What percentage of all issues are resolved proactively? Please explain how this percentage is calculated?
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What is the average response time of service engineers?
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What is the escalation process if a problem arises?
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Who is the point of contact when a problem arises?
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What support team is running in the background to support the service engineers?
Be aware of what machines, devices and printers are covered by your Managed Print Service contract. It can often happen that there are multiple machines in an office and not all are covered by the same company or some may not have an SLA attached to them, so what happens in this instance?
Is your equipment monitored? Generally, an MPS provider has a piece of facilities management software that is on the server and reports back to the provider around toner usage and depletion and also around any technical errors. This allows the MPS provider to act and react proactively to the situation, e.g. sending toner out before it runs out or getting the technician out before something fails.
2.Engineer Capability and Availability
The quality of service delivered is contingent on the quality of the Service Engineers that are employed by your MPS provider. Questions to consider:
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How many Engineers are on the road and what areas do they service?
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What level of training and experience do the Engineers have?
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How often do they upskill? What investment does the company give towards ensuring the Engineers are up to date with new technologies, software and devices?
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How is their availability managed?
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Are the Engineers specialists in the devices that are being proposed?
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Are you Engineers qualified to repair devices from other brands? If yes, which ones?
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What parts are carried by Engineers for first visits?
3.Uptime
What do we mean by uptime? Essentially that everything is up and running, allowing you to carry on with your core business. A good day is when you are not talking about your printers! The closer to 100% the better; our aim is for the five 9s or 99.999% uptime! If your MPS provider is not in the high 90s, you need to find out why and what are the issues and what is causing the downtime. Downtime means frustrations, loss of productivity and loss of earnings.
Other questions you might ask in relation to SLAs for Managed Print Services are based around the capability of remote support and the tracking of consumables:
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What is the level of capability of your remote support offering?
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How do we track where consumables are located when they are in the process of being delivered?
When it comes to SLAs for Managed Print Services, it’s good to take all of these elements into account, but ultimately, you need to ask questions that relate to what your company needs and judge the service level agreement based on whether it meets your requirements for the service. Get references and look for testimonials too!
Your MPS provider should be willing to be flexible but should also be able to provide analytics on the service and give future recommendations for your company’s print management strategy based on your usage and your future growth strategy.
Article supplied by Jean Evans at Highline Office Technology