Bean counting and resourcing technical support. Ricoh has some answers.
Richard Darling
“Ricoh has some answers”
In times of economic difficulty, costs must be checked and where possible reduced. Every penny spent must give a benefit. Scrutiny is essential, especially when budget plans have been dealt a corona viral blow.
It can be tempting to cut technical support for a product or system, expecting (or hoping) that rate of sales or growth will sustain regardless, expecting that customer satisfaction can just maintain itself. However, the effect can potentially be very negative and there can be a time lag between cost-cutting actions and the resulting effect on efficiency and satisfaction at the customer interface.
Financial planning spreadsheets used to examine and optimise the difference between revenue, cost of sales, and then overheads are easy to manipulate. A price increase or a squeeze on product materials or suppliers make the contribution better… theoretically. The bottom line can be improved by reducing support resource and overhead.
Even in ‘normal times’ some inkjet technology vendors over the years have been reticent to introduce technical support and often resourcing is far from comprehensive. Thus, integrators and developers get by themselves. Others have been well known for providing high quality, readily available, proactive, expert, engineering support which for many developers has enabled collaborative, productive and effective relationships, between companies and individuals. This has rightly been a significant element to OEMs’ partnering decisions.
There has to be a return on investment: no business applies cost without a benefit. However, some of the benefits are difficult to directly attribute to support. How do you measure whether reducing help to a customer causes that customer to shop around, to decide to switch their business or does this provoke printhead price erosion with resultant margin squeeze? Can the level of support affect the time taken to turn OEM concepts into marketable products? Are their extra associated risks of technical failure as well as market traction and commercial success from a less supported development path? How long after the cost is saved is there a negative effect?
Printheads themselves are the fruit of hundreds of millions of dollars of scientific, engineering and production technology research and development over decades. They are expensive to produce and to buy. They often amount to a high percentage of total equipment cost. They are not commodities and should not be consumables. Integration of inkjet needs support: specifiers and buyers’ decisions do and should consider the product itself, the printhead, coupled with the support for the product.
Quite a few developers report a tightening of support resource from inkjet technology vendors. Some vendors may be focusing resource exclusively on the largest of their existing customers, a typical Pareto, but that is hardly a recipe for growth unless there’s a precise insight of who will be the rising stars for the next 5 years. New customers, unless they’re one of the traditional big names, can struggle to get appropriate initial help from a large printhead company. Some of the printhead vendors have effectively, even pre Covid-19, squeezed their support by either reducing engineer numbers or introducing barriers to uptake such as charging schemes.
A cold, bean-counting approach can tweak spreadsheet in the safety of an ivory tower or a home office in complete isolation from the real prospects of knock-on effects: pinch some pennies here and there, then 18 months later grill salespeople about why the pounds have stopped coming in. There are cases evident now that inkjet support is tighter, reduced, in some cases than it was over recent years.
Ink companies can suffer too from printhead producer attitudes. No warranty for the printhead if it is used with ink? If an ink company tries to work with a printhead producer, they might gain an impression from some of contempt for those inserting a contaminating, damaging fluid into such a beautiful, scientific creation. Any warranty grudgingly given is actually not worth the paper it’s printed on because there’s always something wrong with the ink! The printhead would have worked perfectly if only there was no ink inside it! And the ink companies are told that they must pay a royalty to the printhead producer to even entertain the idea of testing. Additionally, sometimes tens of thousands of pounds or dollars or euros must be paid to carry out tests at all, and results from testing are a bit of characterisation, a pass or fail, a waveform and a disclaimer.
Though an inkjet printhead producer for 40 years, Ricoh was a relative latecomer to Europe: Ricoh only established a global inkjet technical centre (GIJTC) in Telford, UK 6 years ago. This centre includes ink testing equipment and experts, and some of the test methods are not only cutting edge but unique to Ricoh to study the aspects of inkjetting that can cause the most pain. We search for problems and solutions in the lab to try and avoid system frailty in the field. The centre is also a base for our applications support and engineering team: their job is to help people build inkjet equipment with Ricoh components. And we have a range of test rigs and equipment to test substrates, printing and even software.
The Ricoh mission is to be the industrial technology vendor of choice, to spread the use of digital technology to industry. We aim to help our partners keep development costs – money, time and risks – to a minimum.
Our GIJTC has become known by many of our customers as a place to come and test or try, a source of help, the base for the engineers and scientists they see (sometimes face to face in normal times) and the Ricoh part of their own teams. It’s also a training centre where we can share knowledge of inkjet, general and specific to Ricoh. For example, we don’t just develop waveforms – we also teach our customers the techniques and tools of waveform development for Ricoh’s printheads, openly and without hiding behind an IP cloak of secrecy.
Ricoh modelled its support on the best available from other inkjet technology vendors. Of course Rome was not built in a day: from a small start, the centre has been steadily building resource and capability. There have been constraints and no-one could claim that Ricoh has been best in class throughout. That said Ricoh has consistently held the view that support must progressively develop to form systematic ways to apply help for closer technical collaborations with developers and integrators. Access is important too: immediate welcome for and engagement with new entrants to inkjet or to the Ricoh inkjet scene is essential. This all continues because the positive effects are well understood.
Ricoh is determined to strategically partner with fluid formulators in a similarly progressive way. Often the adoption of inkjet in otherwise analogue worlds is based on screen, flexo or gravure ink producers’ knowledge of and relationships with customers (OEMs and often end-users too) and industry sectors. It also relies on the chemists’ knowledge of the substrates and applications. Ricoh is partnering with a number of key ink producers to proactively ensure that fluids, delivery devices and applications are tied together as a system to make it as easy and ready for customers as is possible.
Our ink partner programme includes a modular, systematic package of technical services for ink study and formulation guidance, for ink-printhead compatibility testing, for drive and waveform development and optimisation, plus ink substrate and imaging process evaluation. This applies to existing Ricoh printheads but also works ahead of new technology and printhead introductions to improve the readiness and applicability for markets and target applications. Our aim is to reduce both development risk and time to adoption.
Now is certainly not the time for ambitious technology originators to pinch the pennies and squeeze front-line support resources. This, more than ever, is the time for strengthening a progressive approach to collaboration. Industries really need the benefits that our technology can offer in new formats in new supply chains and with new innovators.
If you are a developer with an idea for inkjet or a fluid producer who recognises the benefit of the type of help described here, please test the support that Ricoh can offer. Bring it on.
For more information email by clicking the following link: Richard Darling
