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10 Questions to Ask when inviting to tender/RFP for MPS (PART 1)

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Managed Print Services (MPS) come in all shapes and sizes - it’s a cliche, but it’s true.

With different size businesses, in different industries, with different business goals, Managed Print Services are often more bespoke than you might think and when you’re in the position of inviting MPS suppliers to tender/RFP, there are certain questions to ask to ensure you get a service that’s right for your organisation.

Our two-part blog covers 10 questions to ask when inviting to tender/RFP for Managed Print Services.

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Question 1: How do you define managed print?

It might come across as a slightly odd question but managed print can be defined in a number of ways, for example, is it just about printers and consumables or does it include security and the optimisation of paper-heavy processes?

Depending on what your company is looking for from an MPS provider, how they define Managed Print Services could give a key insight as to what you’ll get.

Question 2: What’s the scale of provision?

This question is the key to figuring out whether a provider is likely to be a ‘one stop shop’ for all your print and document related needs including hardware, software and services including assessment.

It will also give you an idea as to whether the provider has a future-proofed service that can meet future requirements.

In situations where the service is more bespoke, asking the scale of provision can be a great way to find out if the service is flexible enough to fit what your organisation needs.

Question 3: What are your levels of uptime/SLAs?

Service level agreements help to outline aspects of the service being offered and when they’re not questioned, it’s possible to be hit by unfair terms, such as long or delayed fix times if an issue arises.

Every provider you invite to tender/RFP should be able to provide information on uptime, call-out time, first time fix percentage etc. and it’s important to consider whether the service level agreements match your requirements

Here are some of the questions you could ask:

  • Are your engineers specialists in the brand of device that you are proposing?
  • What is the level of your ‘first time fix’?
  • What is the average time to resolution of the issue?
  • What is the engineer response time?
  • Who is the first point of contact when any problem arises?

Question 4: Service Transparency and Management Information (Reporting data)

It’s important with any Managed Print Service to have the right management information as it can help to optimise processes and make data driven decisions.

With the right management information from your MPS provider you can:

  • Check if the MPS provider is on track to provide the benefits/ROI (cost reductions, environmental savings, productivity gains, uptime, etc) agreed at the start of the project.
  • Allocate costs by department/location/customer.
  • Use the quantified benefits (in terms of trees saved, carbon footprint reduction, cost savings, etc) that have been realised to publicise the good work internally within your company.
  • Use insights provided to make decisions to optimise the solution or optimise internal processes that use a lot of paper.

It might also be crucial to gain visibility of the management information in order to report back to the organisation on ROI and print related numbers.

Question 5: What level of document security and data privacy do you offer?

As printing and document devices become more connected than ever, document security and data privacy is a vital part of any Managed Print Service.

The MPS providers that you speak to should be able to give you in-depth details about how they keep data secure and the levels of security that are put in place.

Questions to ask in regards to document security and data privacy could include:

  • Please tell us about the on-board security that comes with the hardware solution.
  • Does your security include:
    • Image overwrite
    • Encryption
    • Whitelisting/blacklisting
    • Pin/card based printing
  • Please tell us if the security elements of your solution have been approved or provided by any major security organisation.
  • How does your solution help to comply with GDPR?

These 5 questions are one place to start when considering the questions to include in an MPS RFP, see another five in part 2 of this blog: 10 Questions to Ask when inviting to tender/RFP for MPS (PART 2), or check out our new eGuide: How to write an invitation to tender/RFP for Managed Print Services, which can be downloaded here

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