Created in Martinique in 1989, the SMB Group has now been active for nearly 20 years in the West Indies, French Guiana, Reunion Island and Mayotte. With a workforce of 120 employees, SMB is a major player in the office automation and IT market. It works with professionals (SMBs), key accounts and public stakeholders (local authorities, administrations, hospitals, etc.). Its installed base exceeds 10,000 machines, mainly Toshiba and Lexmark brands. The Group internalises the entire value chain, from marketing to fleet maintenance. In order to optimise maintenance operational flows, SMB wished to integrate more software solutions.
The initial need to find an effective fleet management solution came from a desire to respond ever more quickly to our customers’ expectations. This results in uninterrupted communication between the Group and its machine fleet. This permanent connection makes it possible to have: (I) feedback on toner levels and to trigger automatic deliveries without risk of shortages at the customer’s premises, (II) feedback on breakdowns to considerably reduce repair times, (III) more recurrent invoicing… The choice of Bluemega’s KPAX solution came naturally as it met all these expectations while bringing together manufacturer solutions which are often very different.
As far as configuration is concerned, the counters are retrieved by KPAX and uploaded directly into our ERP. This connection optimises toner deliveries (without risk of shortages) based on customer consumption habits. This reduces stocks and spending at the end of the chain. Technical alerts are used to better classify breakdowns during customer calls, ensuring the success of our technicians’ interventions.
The implementation required a number of extensive tests on several solutions. We chose Bluemega, based on their offer of a complete solution, a good price, very positive feedback on their efficiency as well as the availability and flexibility of the Bluemega team. High quality support is an essential element in the success of such a software. The “made in France” element also played in its favour. We started deploying KPAX in September 2018. Nine months later, over 30% of our fleet is managed through the solution. KPAX is easy to deploy, aided by emails sent to customers to explain the installation process, which facilitates the work of SMB teams. Creating user profiles, tree view structures and associated rights is simple. Data integration into the ERP is done easily using import files. The calculated fields allow you to customise data and individualise answers according to customer needs. Support is key and I have to say that we were well supported by the Bluemega team and the Bluemega Academy portal which centralises all the necessary documents.
We are now looking forward to the new version of KPAX and hoping that it can help us to better manage consumable buffer stocks, that it will allow access from mobile devices and that Toshiba departmental counters can be collected. The Liberty box, alternative equipment for structures with insufficient infrastructure to carry the KPAX collection agent, is interesting, we hope that the new version of this box will be less expensive.
Jules Destin – Technical Director SMB 97