KOESIO was founded in 1991 by Mr. Pieric Brenier. We historically provide printing solutions but have expanded into IT and telephony. While we initially developed solely in the Rhône Alpes region, the KOESIO group decided to internationalise its offer a few years ago. The group has 1500 employees and our main brands are Canon, Toshiba, Kyocera and HP.
For our printing solutions, our strategy is to use several manufacturers, which meant that for a printing system management solution it would have been too complicated to use several brand manufactured tools. Therefore, we looked to a multi-brand compatible product like KPAX. Bluemega also had the added advantage of being a highly responsive software publisher, attentive to our needs. Our initial aim was to automate meter readings, to integrate them automatically into our ERP to facilitate invoicing and to save our customers from having to do it, while ensuring better service by automatizing handling as much as possible.
We quickly began to use KPAX to improve the management of consumables, with the constant aim of relieving our customers of the restocking tasks and optimising stock management. The issue is to deliver the ink cartridge at the right time to our end customers, without them needing to have stocks. Therefore, we relieved our customers of this task which enables us to have better control over the flow of consumables. Stocks were reduced by 20% in the first year.
The data collected by KPAX is used by the sales team. It enables them to provide dynamic monitoring of the volumes used by our customers on each device. These volumes enable us to refine our offer when renewing the fleet to be as close as possible to the users’ real needs.
To date, we have 40,000 devices connected to KPAX Manage, 23,000 of these are in the Rhône-Alpes region. But the solution is being extended to new regions. Depending on the specific context of each customer, the devices are connected either by the KPAX software agent or through the KPAX Liberty device. This hardware agent, launched by Bluemega in 2016 is a great help to us, enabling us to sidestep the problems of unstable environments (no server) which generate numerous disconnections, or specific environments (Mac environment) which were impossible to connect.
As well as generalising KPAX Manage in all our regions, we have a lot of other ideas for this software. To start with we’d like to be able to implement more requests on the data collected by KPAX Manage to refine our analyses and to provide a better service for our customers. Then we hope to implement the means of reducing the intervention times and on-site visits of our technicians with remote maintenance. Today, KPAX is highly integrated in our internal tools, we have very high hopes for the new version which is due to launch this year.
Laurent Delorme – Technical Manager for Groupe KOESIO
