26 01732 759725 MANAGED SERVICES At the beginning of May, Apogee Corporation, an HP Company since 2018, announced that it was investing an additional £250,000 in employee training as it continues to accelerate its transformation from a managed print services provider into a managed workplace services provider. The investment in role-specific coaching, mentoring and the Apogee Learning Academy eLearning platform is part of a company-wide drive to support employees at every stage of their career at Apogee. With a particular focus on upskilling in IT and compliance, it will also strengthen Apogee’s in-house capabilities as it expands its service offering to include managed IT services, as well as managed print and document services. Apogee was starting down this road when the pandemic struck, and the long-lasting changes to technology infrastructure and working practices that have followed have only reinforced CEO Aurelio Maruggi’s conviction that the company’s future lies in diversification and more strategic relationships with its 11,000-plus customers, many of which, like Service appeal Apogee, are embarking on digital transformation projects of their own. “At the onset of the COVID pandemic, we realised that work wasn’t going to be the same and that there was an opportunity for us to continue to provide clients with what I like to describe as the single most important product that Apogee delivers, which is peace of mind. We realised there was an opportunity to provide peace of mind beyond print – to understand the customer’s environment; to understand the journey they are on, be it towards digital transformation or more automation; to provide a range of possible solutions that the client can rely on to drive that digital transformation; and, even more importantly, to support those solutions with hardware or software that we are able to put together, configure, deliver to the client and support throughout its lifecycle,” he said. In addressing these concerns, Apogee has continued to expand its offering beyond managed print, introducing a range of additional services that in some cases were developed to help customers overcome specific challenges associated with lockdowns and remote working, as Maruggi explains. “We currently have three categories of service. One is managed print services. The second is what we call Outsourced Document Services, where we produce medium to high volume print on behalf of customers at our two production centres, one in the City and one close to Manchester, supported by our own delivery services. “In March to May 2020, to meet customer demand, we added scanning services to our Outsourced Document Services. During the pandemic a lot of clients redirected their physical mail to our production centres, where we open the envelope, check the contents and scan documents to a cloudbased repository or to an employee for processing. “We also have a hybrid mail service, which was particularly valuable during Covid and still is for hybrid workers. Hybrid mail gives every worker the equivalent of a printer driver on their desktop or laptop that enables them to send a document to one of our production centres for printing, along with the address and type of postage required. There, it is professionally printed, put in an envelope, franked and delivered to the addressee, saving a lot of time and inconvenience for hybrid workers who no longer have access to a franking machine. “Our document services business has been experiencing doubledigit growth and we expect it to continue to grow steadily. A lot of medium to large companies in our customer base still have internal reprographic centres where they do high volume production printing and more and more of them are keen to outsource that work and redeploy the resources and investment from their reprographic centre to IT or other parts of the organisation. “The third area is what we call Managed IT Services. This covers a very broad spectrum of technologies and services and the approach we are taking is not to boil the ocean all at once but to identify areas of IT that have closer adjacencies to the services that we already provide in managed print. “So, at the beginning of last year, we started providing devicespecific services. In the case of desktops or laptops, for example, we would identify the right device for the client’s needs; configure it, or image it as it is called in the PC world; deliver it to the right location after the device has been properly tagged; provide remote monitoring and remote support throughout the device’s lifecycle; provide break and fix services if needed; and, last but not least, provide end of life Apogee Corporation is making an additional six-figure investment in training as part of its expansion plans. James Goulding reports Aurelio Maruggi
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=