Unstable data collectors, an outdated interface, limited reporting, support tickets that go nowhere, features that quietly break: for many dealers and managed print service providers, this has simply become “how it works.” Mark Kouwenberg, director of sales at MPS Monitor, argues the real cost isn’t switching platforms, it’s staying on one that no longer earns its place.
You already know the list. If you’re honest about why you haven’t moved away from your print fleet management platform, the answer rarely has much to do with the platform itself.
“You’ve been using it for 10 years, it fits the way you’ve always worked, and switching feels like a bigger job than living with the problems,” says Mark. “That’s the trap. You get used to inefficiency. Because you’ve done something one way for a decade doesn’t mean it’s still the right way to do it.”
The problems dealers describe are strikingly consistent, and each one carries a cost, even if it never shows up on a single invoice. A data collector that goes offline means dispatching an engineer just to check a counter, a truck roll and technician’s time a working monitoring solution should have made unnecessary. Support tickets left unanswered for days cost you responsiveness with your own customers. A platform with no visible roadmap leaves you in the dark about the future enhancements and improvements, or whether today’s issues will ever be fixed. Add features that are announced but don’t work, reporting that doesn’t match reality, weak or non-existent ERP and CRM integrations that slow invoicing and hurt cash flow, and increasingly no formal security certifications to show a customer who asks for one, and you have friction quietly eating into margin at every step.
“None of this is one dramatic failure,” Mark says. “It’s a slow accumulation of small frictions people have stopped noticing, because they’ve built their whole process around working around them.”
Not only a legacy platform problem
Mark is careful to point out this isn’t only a story about legacy platforms. “Some of the tools causing the most pain today were perfectly fine a few years ago,” he says. “The market has moved on since. Security expectations, integration expectations, the insight customers want from their print fleet, all of that has changed. Choosing well a few years ago doesn’t mean that same platform still meets what’s required today, and that’s not a reflection on the decision, it’s just how quickly the market moves.”
That distinction matters, because the decision to migrate shouldn’t be judged only by how old a system is, but by whether it can still do the job today. “If your DCA keeps dropping out, if support takes three emails for a straight answer, if your ERP and your monitoring platform won’t talk to each other properly, if there is no clear roadmap, age is not really the question,” he adds. “The question is whether it’s working for you, right now.”
Temporary pain versus permanent pain
The core of Mark’s argument is a simple trade-off. “The pain you live with today by staying on a platform that doesn’t work is permanent. It doesn’t go away on its own. The pain of migrating is temporary, it has a start and an end date.”
MPS Monitor’s answer is what it calls white glove migration: a dedicated technical manager assigned to you for the length of the switch, used as much or as little as your business needs. “We don’t hand you an API and a key/login and wish you luck,” he says. “Migration is something we do with a dealer, not something we leave them to figure out.”
On the other side of migration, Mark points to what a modern platform should deliver: stable, reliable data collection in different forms, not just a DCA; integrations with your ERP, CRM and service management platforms; reporting through tools like Power BI so you can act on your data rather than just collect it; recognised security certifications, and a clear strategy for the next era of device management.
The real question
For Mark, the conversation dealers should be having isn’t ‘is it time to migrate?’ but ‘is our current platform still earning its place?’
“Print volumes are declining, margins are tighter, and your customers expect more insight, not less,” he says. “Staying with something that doesn’t work isn’t playing it safe, it’s leaving growth on the table. A platform that works doesn’t just remove pain, it gives you new services to sell, a stronger retention story, and a real edge over the dealer down the road still living with the problems you just fixed.”
