"After sales service, low running cost, low cost of replacement parts and environment friendliness are significant expectations since the functionality and features are more or less similar across brands."

On the MFD market in India vs. the global market

MFDs are rapidly growing in popularity, especially amongst corporate and home office users. However, buyers are still very cost conscious and are very particular about running costs. MFDs are typically used with less number of users for each printer. For more heavy duty printing, standalone laser printers are common due to low running costs and high durability.

On the demand drivers of the MFD market

A high adoption of computers for official communication combined with a contradictory habit of maintaining hard copy backups has led to a surge in demand for electronic printing and scanning technologies. The demand for MFDs is still more for personal computing or sharing within a small group, rather than for industrialized or heavy duty printing.

On the major solutions' vendors you are aligned with and your expectations from them

We are currently aligned with HP. After sales service, low running cost, low cost of replacement parts, and environment friendliness are significant expectations since the functionality and features are more or less similar across brands.

What are the main desired features and specifications in relation to the MFD solution being used currently? Is there any solution that may be considered as Gold Standard in this segment?

Ease of use, network printing capability, compact design (space saving), high output quality (sharp prints), reasonable initial cost, excellent after sales service, and environment friendliness form the key factors in typical purchase decisions.

HP Officejet J6488 is one such solution when the number of prints required is less. However, for a larger user base, laser printers are more popular due to their robustness and cost efficiency.

On your expectations from MFD vendors

Our expectations are in terms of after sales service, ability to provide a wide choice of MFD models/brands, cost competitiveness, commitment to delivery schedules, timelines, and SLAs.

On the challenges faced in terms of pricing, after sales service, delivery, etc. and other problem areas

Challenges are faced in terms of delivery as adhering to delivery schedules may be lacking sometimes. Also, vendors should provide a single point of contact to simplify the after sales service process.

On your suggestion to a buyers of MFD

Buyers should look for:

• Good after sales service
• Low cost of replacement parts

On the effect of the current economic slowdown on your procurement plans

We have restricted our purchase to the basic essentials. We are also favouring solutions with a low initial investment.

On how deeply does the environment-friendliness of the solution impact the purchase decisions and how important is it to organize operations around the principle of going green

Our organisation is committed to environment friendliness. Green devices and functionalities (like double sided printing) are favoured against regular devices.

On your perception about the future of this market segment

This market will move to managed print services, where users will pay for outcomes- reduced costs per page, flexibility of going up or down on print volumes, flexibility to prioritize print jobs on a shared infrastructure, not needing to worry about high consumables costs, and reduced costs of IT/staff support.

Anything else that you may like to add

The future potential for such devices is excellent. However, it will be great to see more intelligent devices especially in a network printing environment. Devices should be able to prioritise jobs from different users and depending on the type of the job. For e.g. they should be able to distribute jobs among other network printers depending on the type of job (e.g. colour vs. b/w printouts), job queue (a printer with a long job queue forwards a job to another printer after taking the users permission), out-of-paper status, etc.