PRINTITRESELLER.UK 37 It’s supporting the circular economy, because why should these machines be thrown away when they’ve got another 50 - 60% life? INTERVIEW technical is important to us, so from that perspective, we’re pushing hard for it. PITR: PCL also remanufactures consumable parts, such as drums, fusers etc. and obviously you do that to your high technical standards, but there isn’t any similar body that certifies those is there? DH: No and I think that’s the problem, probably the ETIRA organisation is the first time where we can see the potential to grow almost a standalone accreditation for that side of it. But at the moment there isn’t anything and I think that’s again part of the problem as you’ve got to have the baseline of quality all the time. We do all it in-house, we have our set checks and rules and quality control, but that’s not a global thing. So, to try and better evaluate what we do and push that to a much larger platform is definitely in our set of key aims moving forward. PITR: You have extended your offering with the launch of the Eco-Direct line of remanufactured MFPs, meaning you are effectively closing the loop and supporting a circular economy. With the race to net zero, sustainability is front and centre for organisations of all sizes and in all sectors, and indeed is a criterion that needs to be addressed on many RFPs. Andrew Ellis (AE): It makes sense for us to go into machines because we’re creating all the remanufactured parts for fuser units and transfer belts, and we’ve got the knowledge internally. Most machines have got a life of a million prints. And most machines have done say two or 300,000 prints by the time we get them. So, we strip them right down to the core and rebuild them, reset the counters to zero and repackage them and that then becomes a good value offering for dealers. PITR: How has this new line been received by dealers? Is it helping them win new business? AE: Very much so, it’s offering the dealers another line in between a second-hand machine and a new one, and the end user value for money, and obviously it helps retain profits for the dealers. It’s supporting the circular economy, because why should these machines be thrown away when they’ve got another 50 - 60% life? The other thing with it really is we’re creating a price list, brochures, a support site for the dealers, so it’s not dissimilar to what they are used to with an OEM, but of course, it’s a green solution. So really, it’s been fantastic. We launched it a couple of years ago, and we’ve been fine tuning it all the time to make the quality better and better. PITR: What plans do you have in terms of new launches in the coming months? DH: For such a long time we’ve been specialists really in Konica Minolta, Develop and Olivetti, and the marketplace will only allow for that for so long. So, what we’ve started to do is look broadly at what dealers require, certainly during COVID some dealers who couldn’t get certain manufacturers’ products then started looking at dualline and it gave us the opportunity to expand what we do, and not just expand from a toner point of view, but also on the technical products. The circular economy is the key bedrock of what we're doing. It’s that reuse of the OEM virgin cores. In the coming months, we will look into Canon, Ricoh, UTAX and Kyocera. There’s a lot of development work gone into that already, so that should give us and certainly from a sales perspective, a broader approach to the marketplace and the channel. https://www.pcl-direct.com To watch the full interview please scan the QR code
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=