For many MSPs, manufacturing clients are often among your most challenging clients.
Much like their assembly line, manufacturers demand a reliable and efficient workflow in all aspects of their business. And that includes their managed services.
While they can be taxing to keep up with, they can also be some of the most lucrative clients your MSP serves.
Many within the manufacturing industry operate across multiple locations, meaning that a single deal can generate dozens of sites to take under your wing.
To help you meet your manufacturer’s demands, consider referring them to your preferred managed print services provider - Print Partner!
Print Partner operates throughout the United States and Canada, serving the clients of MSPs across North America. With hundreds of manufacturing sites under our parent company’s management, we know how to keep up with the dynamic and complex printing and document workflows of manufacturing sites.
In this article, we’ll review why your manufacturing clients can benefit from managed print services and why your MSP should take advantage of this highly lucrative referral opportunity.
Multi-Location Print Strategies for Manufacturing
When your manufacturing clients have operations across several sites, standardizing processes should always be a priority.
Manufacturers are all about efficiency - they want everything to run like clockwork.
Consider the following: you have a client with ten factories. Do you think each site has a unique assembly line, or do you think they all follow a nearly identical workflow that has been fine-tuned and approved by its leadership team?
Any competent manufacturer follows the latter structure - why have ten different workflows instead of implementing all factories under the one “tried and true” workflow?
Standardizing processes is optimal for any factory setting where the business aims to produce as much of a good as possible and as efficiently as possible. But this way of thinking should extend beyond typical production line issues - and that includes your client’s printing and document workflow.
To standardize print processes across an organization, set your clients up with a national managed print services provider.
With a nationwide network of professionals, a quality MPS provider can review your client’s business from a birds-eye view of all operations. They can identify all problematic devices across the entire fleet, along with slowdowns in workflow, vulnerabilities in security, and other factors that may hold your client back.
After a proper assessment, the MPS provider can propose changes that benefit not only the client’s individual sites but the organization as a whole.
The vendor will collaborate with your client’s leadership to align with their goals, whether that be faster workflows, cost reduction, sustainability goals, or all of the above. Wherever leadership wants the company to be, MPS can help get them there.
For more information, read: Top Benefits of Standardizing Your Clients’ Print Fleet
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Most manufacturers are very familiar with robotic process automation (RPA) and using machines to handle tasks that were once dependent on humans. RPA is a standard in modern assembly lines.
But despite how fine-tuned manufacturers’ operations are, many neglect the benefits automation can provide to their document workflow.
In printing and document management, RPA can be a game-changer. When correctly implemented, managed print services providers can automate tasks that once required an entire team of clerical staff to complete.
RPA handles the time-eating, repetitive busy-work that day-to-day business requires, allowing clients to save their employees’ time and their business money on labor costs.
Automation also helps manufacturers keep up with compliance, auditing, and environmental requirements set by regulatory authorities. Failure to comply with these measures can jeopardize a business, but automated workflows ensure there is no room for human error. All documents are neatly organized and categorized at all times.
With their freed-up resources, manufacturers will have the ability to invest in profit-generating tasks like sales and marketing - an undeniable fact that will be sure to capture the attention of any C-level executive.
Flexibility and Scalability
If you’ve worked with enough manufacturers, you’ve likely encountered their mindset of producing more, more, and more!
The ability to seamlessly scale their business operations is a necessity in the industry.
When they decide to open a new site location or expand one of their existing plants, they need to know who to call for every new piece of equipment and service they need. That includes their production machines, but also things like their IT service, Internet, and yes, their print.
If your client works with a series of local print vendors to manage each of their locations, scaling can make things complicated.
What if the business expands to a region or state outside their MPS provider’s scope? In that case, the client would need to find another print provider, which kind of defeats the purpose of MPS in the first place.
But if your client works with a national or cross-border print vendor, they can seamlessly integrate services and equipment in new places of operation.
When referring your client to a print provider, make sure that the provider can serve not only your clients’ current needs, but their future needs as well!
Print Partner and Manufacturing Clients
Your MSP’s manufacturing clients are a busy crowd. As their trusted technology advisor, they rely on your organization to guide them toward making the right decisions about their environment.
And while their eyes may not “light up” when they hear the words “printers” and “document management,” their attention will certainly be piqued once they discover the effects MPS can have on their bottom line.
If your MSP is looking for a high-quality print vendor to refer your manufacturing clients to, consider working with Print Partner.
Our parent company, Green Office Partner, provides print and document solutions to manufacturing sites across the United States and now Canada. We provide dynamic solutions for manufacturers to meet their changing needs.
“Green Office Partner changes our fleet as our business needs change. We never feel ‘locked’ into our contract,” says Jason Scher, Chief Operating Officer at the national chocolate factory network, Vosges Haut-Chocolat.
When you send us a qualified referral, we pay you at least $250 for the introduction plus additional commission when the deal closes and 5% on their lifetime print allotment.
So if you‘d like to help your clients and get paid for doing so, then consider partnering with us, a Print Partner you can trust.
