Q&A
Daniel Lancaster, Director , Nuvem Solutions View from the channel
Automate to support businesses in business optimisation. It’s not just the old-school document management and moving documents around, it’s actual AI support in business processes to make things more efficient. Internally, we use Claude. We’re leveraging AI on processes to find gaps, improve things and become more efficient, so that we can stay at the sharp end of being competitive in the market and offering the best value. Q: When selling MFPs, what are the most popular software solutions you provide and why? A: Our two core software products are around print management. We sell quite a lot of PaperCut Hive and we also sell PrinterLogic. They’ve both got their nuances and where they fit in the market. Q: If you could change one aspect of your job, what would it be and why? A: Me and Mike started the business with just the two of us. We didn’t have a service team, so we logged service calls, ordered toners etc. we literally did everything for the first few years. We’ve now got a really good team where we can probably do a lot less, but I’m still relatively heavily involved in quite a lot of things that I probably don’t need to be. So, I’d probably step back a bit more. Q: How do you spend your week – time on phone, face to face meetings with customers etc.? A: Working with the team internally on whatever problems or issues they’ve got and supporting them in any way I possibly can. I’m also on top of the business in terms of financials and business strategy, what the month and the year look like, where we’re going and what targets we’re hitting. I also still go out and see clients and do new business, as well as working with existing clients and doing review meetings. No two weeks are ever the same. Q: What would make your job easier? A: It’s probably more of a personal challenge to take myself out of being involved in every situation I possibly can across the business.
do some work with Develop around print production machines. My business partner and I came from Arena Group, who were a Toshiba dealer when they got bought by Xerox, so when we set the business up six years ago, our natural progression was to approach Toshiba and say, look, can we do something? In the middle of COVID, and through quite a tough first couple of years, Toshiba supported us and have done ever since. So, we’ve got a really strong relationship and a really strong partnership. We know the kit, we trust the kit and our engineers and service team are also ex-Arena, so a lot of our engineers have been working on Toshiba devices for 20-25 years. There’s no real reason to go to market and look at other OEMs, other than where Toshiba doesn’t do certain things. Q: What are your customers most interested in currently? A: I think there’s a couple of core things at the minute. You’ve got to be commercially competitive; everyone wants to save money. But there’s also been a big drive for years around going paperless or paper‑lite. People have moved towards scanning and scan automation more, and that’s now intertwining with AI. People are looking at how they can automate business processes and how they can use AI around documentation. Whether that’s rewriting a document, creating a new document, or reading a set of documents in legal, for example, to find certain things in those documents. There’s also cybersecurity, but AI seems to be at the forefront of people’s minds in business at the minute. Q: How have you changed/are you changing business operations to exploit new opportunities? A: I think the question is twofold. It’s how we’re changing our business to go to market to our customers, and then how we’re changing our business internally to exploit new opportunities. In terms of our customers, we’ve just got a new van featuring a new logo – ‘AI and workflow automation’. We’re working with partners such as Vasion, to explore going to market with Vasion
Daniel Lancaster
Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing channel businesses today? A: I think there’s a few things. One of the key issues is increased costs, so trying to remain competitive while everything around us goes up in price. Obviously, manufacturers are increasing box prices, toner prices are increasing, parts prices are increasing etc. Something quite relevant at the minute is fuel, £2 a litre when you’re running a few vans and doing thousands of miles a week is expensive. When you’re tendering for business three, four or five months ago, winning it and then delivering it now, the margins are getting squeezed all the time while trying to stay competitive. I think that’s probably the biggest challenge, being competitive on price and giving good value while trying to make a margin and run a business. Q: Which OEMs do you partner with and why? A: We partner mainly with Toshiba and we
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