Monitoring has become the baseline. The harder question is which data matters today, and what action it calls for. Mark Kouwenberg, director of sales at MPS Monitor, discusses “Is printer monitoring dead?” below.
No, printer monitoring is not going anywhere, and I would not want to be the one telling our almost 5,000 dealers otherwise. Meter reads still must be accurate, toner still has to arrive before a device runs dry, and a machine has to be visible before anybody can service it. What has changed is where monitoring sits. Five years ago, collecting reliable data across a mixed fleet was a competitive advantage. Today it is the entry ticket, and we know that dealers’ problem is not a shortage of data, but direction.
Next generation of printer fleet management
MPS Monitor built its Monitor → Manage strategy around one goal: making your (Managed) Print Services contracts more profitable.
Monitoring tells you what happened. Managing decides what happens next. The next generation of device management isn’t about collecting more data; it’s about surfacing the exceptions and decisions that move your bottom line.
Between the two sit four things: understanding what the data means across hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of devices, prioritising what matters today, this week or this month, automating what should never need a person, and putting the answer where the question is asked. That last step is the one our industry has left alone. Reporting assumes that whoever needs an answer knows which file or dashboard to open, and in most dealer businesses that person does not.
MPS Monitor introduces: ChatMPS
ChatMPS is one of the first launches within our Monitor → Manage strategy, and it takes the last step in the above four points: putting the answer where the question is asked. It is the conversational engine of MPS Monitor: you ask it a question about your fleet in your own words, and it answers on your own devices, customers, contracts and even support tickets. Every individual, from top management to sales staff and service engineers gets value from ChatMPS in their daily business.
Why this is not the chatbot you have already seen
Most platforms in this market now have something conversational in them, and most are documentation helpers. They explain features and interpret screens. ChatMPS reads your live data, and the difference is architectural.
A general assistant produces text from what it was trained on, so it has no idea what is happening in your account today. ChatMPS turns your question into a governed query, runs it against your own devices, customers and contracts, and then explains the result. It never writes the query itself, which is what stops it returning a confident wrong number. Where a figure is unavailable it says so, and where an answer rests on a partial sample it tells you. It also knows the vocabulary: managed against unmanaged devices, blended against detailed counters, cost per page. Those distinctions separate a useful answer from a plausible one.
What dealers ask it
The questions from the field are rarely what we expected. A sales executive, the evening before a visit: I am at customer ABC tomorrow, what should I expect? A consumables team: which toners do I need for customer ABC over the next seven days, and provide me with the right SKUs, device IDs and the location details?
None of those used to be a question. They were requests that became spreadsheets, and the spreadsheet arrived after days. ChatMPS also builds the deliverable: an Excel workbook with fleet status and device details, a PowerPoint presentation with QBR and extensive strategic advice on how to improve the customer’s fleet – all this produced in seconds by asking ChatMPS a very simple, one line prompt like ‘For customer X, give me a full fleet status in Excel, and create a presentation with quarterly analysis and fleet improvement suggestions’.
Why the answers hold up
Those deliverables often go straight to a customer, which is why each answer carries its source, scope and the time the data was read. Access follows the permissions the platform already enforces, so nobody sees a fleet they are not entitled to see, and managed and unmanaged populations never merge. ChatMPS inherits the MPS Monitor security posture: ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, CSA STAR Level 2 and GDPR compliance. For now, it answers and explains rather than acting on your behalf, and that is deliberate. We believe the right to act should be earned, not assumed, especially when it comes to AI platforms.
So, is printer monitoring dead?
No. It has become the floor rather than the ceiling. MPS Monitor has a clear Monitor → Manage strategy, and ChatMPS is one of the deliverables inside it, with more to follow. We monitor more than 3 million devices and process more than 55 billion pages a year and that volume keeps growing. What has ended is monitoring as a destination. The next decade of managed print services belongs to the dealers who know what to do with what they see, and ChatMPS is how we are putting that conviction into a product.
ChatMPS is currently in early access with a selected group of dealers.
This article first appeared in Print in the Channel magazine issue #40.
