10 Questions to Ask when inviting to tender/RFP for MPS (PART 2)

This is part 2 of a two-part blog called ‘10 Questions to Ask when inviting to tender/RFP for MPS’ - you can read part one here

In part 1 of this blog, the 5 questions we looked at were:

• Question 1: How do you define managed print?
• Question 2: What’s the scale of provision?
• Question 3: What are your levels of uptime/SLAs?
• Question 4: Service Transparency and Management Information (Reporting data)
• Question 5: What level of document security and data privacy do you offer?

In part 2, we look at how the questions you ask shouldn’t be purely quality of service based, for example, SLAs, scale of provision and reporting, but also how the service will align with your business through change, culture and common business practices, starting with mobile workforces.

Question 6: Can you support a mobile workforce?

As the business world continues to move forward and allows for better mobile working, more people are choosing to work away from the office.

It’s an accelerating trend and in the future it will be vital to know that your MPS provider can offer mobile printing services and document management to ensure remote working is possible.

When questioning this aspect of the service, it will be important to check that the provider can make sure all remote access is secure and what their recommended mobile print solutions might be.

Question 7: What digital transformation capabilities do you have?

Optimising printing processes is a big part of managed print services and when it comes to finding a new provider, it might be good to consider whether they can make paper-based processes more efficient and how they might do so through digital transformation.

If your company did decide in the duration of the next MPS contract that they wanted to digitalise processes, then you need to know that your new provider can offer this.

Here’s what you might ask:

• Please describe your approach to digital transformation, and the different steps involved.
• Do you partner with anyone to provide software solutions?

Question 8: What’s the quality of your hardware and software?

Signing up for a 3-5 year MPS contract is a big decision to make, and you want to know when making the decision that you’ll get the best service possible. For this reason, it’s a good idea to ask about the hardware and software that an MPS provider uses.

Here are a couple of the questions you could ask:

• Please provide information from leading independent analysts to describe the quality of your hardware/software.
• Please describe any accreditations, certifications or awards won by the hardware or software provider.

Question 9: How can you assist with change management?

Change in business is often inevitable, whether it’s growth, changing business objectives or possibly even reducing the size of the business, your MPS provider needs to be able to assist with changes in the business.

For example, if the size of the team doubles, how does the service change to deal with this? What support is in place to ensure that everyone in the business understands change to current systems?

Question 10: Company culture and heritage

As well as the general service offering, it’s always good to get a flavour for who the company are that you’re potentially going to work with and what their company history looks like.

For this, some of the questions you might ask include:

• For how many years has your company provided document solutions?
• For how many years have you provided MPS?
• Have you won any awards? If so, please state.
• What’s the average tenure of account managers?

While these 10 questions are all important when inviting to tender/RFP for managed print services, they are also just the tip of the iceberg and there is much more to be considered.

Our new eGuide: How to write an invitation to tender/RFP for managed print services, covers all these questions in more detail along with other key considerations that need to be taken into account. Download it here.