How many monthly operational reviews have you had with customers where your team was “betting the under” on when you’d see heads start to nod off? Static reports. The same old charts. Not to mention the same follow-up requests for additional reporting. 

It shouldn’t be this way, and it doesn’t have to be with IoT in play. Rather than monotonous reporting, IoT brings real-time, valuable data straight to the customer. At Lexmark, we see this in action nearly daily through our smart refresh, customer governance and process analytics offerings. 

Smart refresh

All electro-mechanical devices, like printers, are eventually going to need maintenance. Parts wear down and need to be replaced. It’s similar to how the bright oil change light pops up on your car’s dashboard after a certain number of miles. Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t question these events. For instance, for your car, why is it after three months and 6,000 miles? Why does a device need to be replaced after a certain number of years?  

With a true IoT-enabled device, set replacement thresholds are a thing of the past. Instead, we are actively instrumenting, monitoring and managing the actual core components of the device, which means we only service the device when needed, rather than on a strict, general schedule.  

This is where a true IoT device maintenance and refresh strategy can apply. If you combine IoT sensor feedback with actual device time in the field, environmental cycling patterns and applicable service call system history and logs, you’ve got a powerful maintenance and refresh strategy.  

We know because that is exactly what we have done with Lexmark Smart Refresh. We have moved from maintenance and device replacement on a set cycle to targeted engagements only when needed. This leads to lower costs and higher customer satisfaction.  

Customer governance portfolio

Furthermore, IoT enhances the customer experience by bringing device data – which the customer actually owns – right to their fingertips. Without IoT enabled devices, customers have to proactively contact their vendor to access data related to device performance or alternatively, wait until their scheduled monthly report is provided to receive a canned operational scorecard.  

This seemingly medieval access to data is a thing of the past in an IoT-connected world. With instrumented devices now communicating constantly to their cloud hosts and IT systems now interconnected through APIs sharing information in real time, data can and should be available at whatever level and frequency is needed. 

Lexmark delivers this through our customer governance portfolio, an analytics suite of visualizations, graphs and charts that allow the customer to engage at whichever level they desire. That could mean a CIO looking for a 10,000-foot view of their full 30,000 printer fleet or a site operations manager drilling down to a singular device in a remote location.  

The data customers have access to is rich and supplemented with third party data as desired. And the customer has access to this suite whenever they want. It isn’t secretly massaged and released in static report form. It is raw, real data available to them at all times – facilitating rapid decision-making.  

Process analytics

Now, while everything I’ve stated so far is great, customers still want and deserve more from their vendor partner. In addition to reporting on how devices perform day-to-day, vendors can go one step further to provide deeper insights that look at device performance data from different angles to draw out actual business process insights for customers.  

Let’s take site efficiency as an example. By tracking an IoT device’s output usage, cycle count and geo positioning, a vendor can identify and communicate differing device behavior across various locations. These differences in performance and unique insights often point to best-in-class business processes in one location or deviations from standard practices in another. 

At Lexmark, we put process analysis into practice by sitting down with customers and looking at print, scan, fax, duplex, job size and other connected device outputs and patterns that identify higher or lower performing locations. In fact, customers in business briefings often jump out of their chairs to get closer to screens to see where there are performance inconsistencies.  

Another example is identifying opportunities for software solutions for business processes tied to connected devices. Hardware companies must be software companies in today’s connected world. And even when business processes are standardized and optimized across all locations, inefficiencies can still be present – particularly related to manual steps required to interact with a device or the information it contains. This is where software can come into play.

With Lexmark devices, this often surfaces in customer engagements where we look at the number of manual touches a customer performs with their information onboarding and offboarding from our devices. Our analytics platform sees the scans, redundancies and the physical paper transfer – highlighting where we can insert our own business process software to assist and streamline. Most of our largest customers aren’t just using our hardware, but are using software that our analytics platforms has identified would drive time and effort out of their core business processes.  

We call all of this Managed Print Services Process Analytics – and it should be a core tenant of delivering additional business value to any connected device customer. 

Partnership potential to unlock IoT product lifecycle management

Customer facing IoT analytics should be at the top of a value list for makers of connected devices. It is our customer’s data fundamentally, and so we need to examine ways to deliver it to them that bring additional value beyond static scorecards.  

Lexmark’s Optra IoT platform drives our print services business. Our proven IoT solutions offer other manufacturers and organizations an accelerated path to transform how they deliver differentiated analytics value, while elevating the overall customer experience. Once IoT data starts flowing, customer analytics value goes on tilt.