PRINTITRESELLER.UK 23 MR: And for Keypoint, what’s next on the agenda? DH: Well, hopefully lots of activity through the summer months. That’s always a time for us to catch up on some of our forecast work, we’re forecasting out some of the global print volume trends. We also have great activity at the moment around some of the production printing areas like direct to garment, direct to textile, labels and packaging. These are relatively new areas for Keypoint that our analysts are really ramping up their knowledge. Lots of resellers identify production as a new revenue opportunity. We’ve seen vendors moving away from their direct sales channels and wanting to push production into indirect as well. So that is definitely something that resellers should be looking out for. of service functions, very few are proactive or predictive. Currently, they are proactive and that they’re set to a schedule and based on historical data, but they’re not actually based on what is happening today. It’s a big leap in actually making all of your service information available instantly, and then being actually able to twist the service function so that it could be improved for that particular customer, that exact customer, not the same as his neighbour and not the same as a large corporation next door, but really, really make it predictive for that particular customer. And I think that’s going to be coming very soon. A lot of vendors have been working on perfecting that, and you do really need a lot of processing power to achieve that, and with advances in processing functionality, we’re going to be seeing that very soon. years ago with the full iPad sized display on an MFP. But we all want things to become smarter and to become more efficient, so we are definitely going to see AI on box in the future. The other way that our industry has really been using AI is in learn management systems. Part of the backbone of our industry is technical service, and to really bring technical service, which is often in the heads of our engineers, or it’s in technical service manuals, to collate that everywhere to a central place into a learn management system so that anybody on the ground doing technical service can get to information at much faster speed. MR: Keypoint Intelligence offers a range of services to support the print channel, what are these and how can print channel vendors access them? DH: Building on our hardware database bliQ, we also have a whole production database. We purchased a company called ProPrintPerformance a while back, and if any resellers are looking to get into production print, that is the place to go to in order to compare hardware. Also behind bliQ is Software Comparison. If resellers are really looking to understand what are the different types of print management solutions that are out there or capture solutions, that’s a really good, strong product. Then, linked to AI is our AI assessment services, which we offer for resellers to really go into their organisation and understand where they could optimise themselves in order to be more efficient, also to talk to their customers about where would customers be able to use AI, so that a reseller can really be in a position to advise their customers on AI and the implementation of AI in the future. MR: We’ve talked about AI, but there are, of course, other emerging technologies that are going to redefine and set the new standard in our industry in the coming months and years. What do you see as having the biggest impact? DH: Predictive maintenance is something that our industry has talked about for so many years. If you really look at those service functions and the delivery ONE-TO-ONE To watch the full interview, please scan the QR code
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