HP’s Vision For The Future Of Work Brett Bailey remembers how uncertain things felt for his com- pany’s business when the pandemic hit in 2020 and his customers fled their offices. “When you’re a channel partner engaged across many technol- ogy areas, and the pandemic hits and you see print volumes go to zero, it was a very scary time,” said Bailey, vice president and partner at WBM Technologies, based in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. But with that fundamental shakeup to work culture came a significant growth opportunity: margin-rich IT services that would allowWBM to shift away from low-margin hardware sales. One area whereWBM has made this push with HP is managed print services.While the company started to embrace the practice before the pandemic, its benefits became more apparent than ever with customers that had untold fleets of unused printers and copiers languishing in empty offices. “When all of a sudden nobody can come to the office, the cost of idle printers and copiers was magnified,” said Bailey. So WBM did some- thing that may have seemed counterintuitive to hardware-driven solu- tion providers of the past: The company made a business out of removing printers from custom- ers’ offices and replacing them with significantly fewer but better devices. But the real value came from offering managed services around the new printers and charging customers based on how many pages they printed. The result was that WBM’s managed print practice “grew more during this period than at any other time in our history,”said Bailey. “I suppose that to the overall print industry, a WBM program that takes an organization from 5,000 devices down to 2,500 devices will look like the market has shrunk by 50 percent. But to WBM, this is a net-new engagement: It’s growth, new rela- tionships and, if we are creating wow-factor results, maybe new opportunities as well,” he said. WBM’s managed print practice is part of a broader portfolio of solutions—ranging from end-user computing to security ser- vices—that the company views as a collection of interconnected experiences in the workplace. Bailey said that perspective aligns well with Lores’ vision of HP as a hybrid work solution provider, especially with its acquisition of Poly. “An acquisition like that makes it very easy for us to continue not just a vendor relationship with HP but a more strategic align- ment because they’re bringing the technologies forward that we need to create the experiences that our customers need,” he said. For Lores, Poly represents an opportunity for HP and its part-
Some channel partners are already noticing that HP is mov- ing faster because of the changes, according to McQuarrie, who said that the vendor wants to localize decision-making wherever possible. “We’re going to keep moving decision-making authority as close to the customer as we can because it’s going to mean that we’re going to be more responsive, we’re going to make better decisions, and that’ll give us an opportunity to serve more cus- tomers more effectively,” he said. There are other ways HP is trying to move faster for partners. For instance, recent improvements to HP’s configure-price- quote tool have led it to produce configurations five times faster, giving partners results in a matter of minutes instead of days or weeks. When it comes to special pricing matters, currently half of price quotes are generated instantly, and HP hopes to increase that to 70 percent when the 2024 fiscal year begins. It’s also much quicker for partners to set up new customers, with results happening in less than one day compared with the
five days or longer it used to take. HP aims to make customer setup something that partners can complete in a matter of minutes in the next fiscal year.
‘We’re going to keep moving decision- making authority as close to the customer as we can because it’s going to mean that we’re going to be more responive, we’re going to make better decisions, and that’ll give us an opportunity to serve more customers more e ectively.’ — Dave McQuarrie, Chief Commercial O cer, HP
Then there’s the sup- ply chain, which HP is strengthening and diversifying to improve lead times for products and ensure it doesn’t go through a repeat of the major shortages it experienced during the first few years of the pandemic, according to McQuarrie. “We were not sufficiently diverse in who we were able to source components from and so when a particular component provider had problems, that meant we had problems, and now we are much more able to spread out our procurement to the places where supply exists,” he said. The company also has tighter relationships with its suppli- ers now, and it has also standardized designs across many of its products so that components can be more easily swapped between them. “We now have the ability to share componentry [and] system architectures that are more standard across our platforms, thus being able to direct supply to the most important parts of the demand if we get into such a situation,” McQuarrie said. HP has spread out its manufacturing and logistics footprint across the globe too. These changes have already allowed HP to cut lead times by more than half across its portfolio between the beginning of this year and early 2022. “We think we’re in much better shape than we were when we came into the pandemic,” he said.
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