How is your dealerships dealing with cpc accounts when the toner is not reaching the stated yeild. I have some TA color machines that get 5k out of a 25k toner. I have had my tech's run toner reports and everything looks good. One machine was under 5% for all colors. I know if the customer is running 20% that this could happen, but my machines are not even close to that.

Are the techs bringing the reports back into the office for you to look at? I have yet to see a report reach my office that pretty much didn't tell the story. And I take it you are looking at the Service Status Page, which has the print coverage yields on it for however many copies it's calculating those results over. If your techs are reporting yields versus bringing them in, I am wondering if they are looking at last page or something.

I'd be curious about this as well.
Our contract costs were up a LOT last year while our volume only went up a little.

I've been concerned for a few years now that while Kyocera is marketing the crap out of 'Low TCO' I see a lot of competition that is just as low or even lower than what we can reasonably do.

A fair amount of this may be attributable to customer's opting for a color machine when they're only doing a couple hundred color copies a month.

How is everybody else handling this kind of situation? I try to include color copies instead of mono in the contract to encourage them to 'use them or lose them' to help cover the extra grand or so in maintenance kit cost, but if there's competition they aren't doing that so I can't either.

I think most dealers calculate their cost on using
5% color fill and in the end the customer runs much more than that.

but 2nd to this is that the task alfa colors machines blow toner, and fill excessively the waste bottles

so you have too stikes against you This customer running more fill than you counted on and the machine blowing toner

I've looked at the service status page, and I don't see a problem there with yields. All seem to be around 5% or < . The other thing is the customers don't use up alot of waste toner bottles. I started having one of my techs pick up the empties from one customer to see if maybe the customer was throwing away toners before they were empty, but that wasn't the case.

Does your maintenance contract include verbage defining what a 'single click' is? Does it also define manufacture toner yield? Your maintenance contracts should also include what I call 'escalators' that allow you to raise the contracts if they make little to no profit, or even worse are losing money.

You should also be having your techs printing out and bringing back the Service Status Page(This page shows you toner coverage on the prints/copies) as part of their service call procedures. Then you can have your Service Manager, Owner, Contract Manager, etc. review those status pages to see what toner coverage is. The biggest problem we had in the past was we were working up our service rates based on the manufacture 5% yield. Most of our problem accounts (ones making less than 20% margin or even worse losing money) are running 10%+ with a few doing 20-23% toner coverage on each color. So we were getting half yields to quarter yields on toners. That will absolutely kill you.

Last area really to think of and review is your customers as you said that aren't doing that much color, but are on a 60 mos. lease. Are you PMing it after 36 mos.? Or are you letting it go and seeing how it performs to the end of contract. This can be a really tough area since Kyocera only warranties their PMs to 36 mos. So if you are throwing in PMs at the end of 36 mos., then that would also need to be adjusted in your service contract write ups to cover that additional cost.

Having been with Konica Minolta, Xerox, and Kyocera over the years, I personally find it easier to determine Kyocera TCOs. I had a hard time predicting costs with Konica Minolta since their consumables rarely ran their yields, and they had basically no credit or warranty on them. You pretty much had to order a brand new IU for example at $450 a pop that rarely came anywhere near it's stated yield. While Konica Minolta's toner was significantly less expensive, the constant replacement of IUs, fusers, belts, etc. easily added up to more than we paid for toner and parts with Kyocera over the years. Kyocera toner on average costs quite a bit more, but their warranties on their PMs and 36 mo. TASKalfa warranty offset the increased cost of toner. It's been almost three years now since I actively sold and carried Konica Minolta so maybe they have fixed their crappy yields on most of their consumables, I don't know.

One thing I actually haven't gotten an answer from my service group on is, does updating firmware reset the Service Status Page toner coverage information.

We had a customer that for awhile every time I saw the service status page looked great. Then a tech did a firmware upgrade, and I saw a page a month later and the coverage for roughly 10,000 copies looked horrible. Before that they were showing great coverages on quite a volume of copies/prints.

But yeah not sure 390mike. If the coverages are at or showing less than 5%, the customer is not throwing away or losing toner cartridges you are sending to them, and the waste toner is not being excessively filled that is a head scratcher. I just haven't personally seen it once we started to dig into an account. You can usually find the culprit pretty easy.

It can only go in three places if you cartridges are empty
1. on the paper
2. in the waste bottle
3. thrown, blown around in the machine

quote:

Originally posted by 390mike:
I've looked at the service status page, and I don't see a problem there with yields. All seem to be around 5% or < . The other thing is the customers don't use up alot of waste toner bottles. I started having one of my techs pick up the empties from one customer to see if maybe the customer was throwing away toners before they were empty, but that wasn't the case.

quote:

Originally posted by TonerDog:
It can only go in three places if you cartridges are empty
1. on the paper
2. in the waste bottle
3. thrown, blown around in the machine

This was what my main question was. The service status page info is simply based on to counts and doesn't necessarily represent real world consumption. One of the biggest questions for me is if a cartridge is rated for 10k for example and the service status page shows less than 5% did the cartridge get 10k. The voyagers certainly didn't get stated yield on black at the very least until they added a service setting to tone down the black.
I'm really curious if anyone's taken the status page and looked at the history of how many toners they've sent out and done the math?

To keep it simple and brief:

Yes the Service Status Page with it's toner yield breakdowns pretty much match up with what we send out. I've taken the E-Automate invoices with X amount of toners on a few accounts we had problems with, and it pretty matched up right with that the machine was saying was being put on the page.

So yes it really does represent real world consumption. We have not run into much toner blowing around in the machine as TonerDog has.

If you read the firmware read me a couple firmwares ago, the calculations was changed for the % and if you have never ran u910 than your
% is really not accurate

quote:

Originally posted by Scotty:

quote:

Originally posted by TonerDog:
It can only go in three places if you cartridges are empty
1. on the paper
2. in the waste bottle
3. thrown, blown around in the machine

This was what my main question was. The service status page info is simply based on to counts and doesn't necessarily represent real world consumption. One of the biggest questions for me is if a cartridge is rated for 10k for example and the service status page shows less than 5% did the cartridge get 10k. The voyagers certainly didn't get stated yield on black at the very least until they added a service setting to tone down the black.
I'm really curious if anyone's taken the status page and looked at the history of how many toners they've sent out and done the math?

This is good reading
I always thought I was the crazy one thinking cost were way greater than OEM estimates
I never take OEM % expectation in factoring of my cost per page.
The color machines (all brands) has been so hard to really calculate I just cannot see including toner in Price per page although all my B&W do.

Starting to get a handle on this. Two of our customers who were really using alot of toner had been replacing toner before the cartridges were empty. I found this out after I forced a few of our customer to exchange their empty toners for new ones. I had the techs bring out the new ones and pick up the old ones. When I weighed the old ones most of them were nearly full. Least I know now that I have machine problem.

Good catch.

ya good catch but why were they doing that? What was thier explanation?

I have three customers who all say the machine is asking for toner or toner is low. What I am not sure of is, why is the machine doing this. Some of the toners are nearly full. I have a post on the color section, but I haven't had any responses to it yet.

The engine PWB goes bad causing the toner out on all 4 colors we have had 2 do it

Machine is working normal. The customer is going to the status button/paper_supplies. When toner reaches 10% they are changing them regardless of whats left in machine.