Top 5 Take-Aways From EUG Conference

We asked Matt Foster, product manager for Printanista, his key takeaways from this year’s EUG Conference (e-automate User Group). Here’s what he had to say.

Since joining ECI in 2022, I’ve heard a lot about the EUG user group and the opportunities it provides to connect with our office technology customers. So I was really excited to attend this year’s EUG conference in Salt Lake City. This was an incredible event that provided the ability to have face-to-face conversations with our customers. As a product manager, it’s so valuable to have first-hand insight into the way our products are used and to be able to ask questions and dig deeper into customer workflows. So, from a product manager who is focused on remote device monitoring, here are my top takeaways from the 2023 EUG Conference:

1. Automation and streamlined workflows continue to be a big priority

So many of our customers rely on automation to support their daily work streams. Workflows that needed to be supported with API connections between e-automate and PrintFleet or FM Audit, are now much more tightly integrated using Printanista. I was pleased to demonstrate how a service error triggered on an MFP could be reported, logged, assigned, investigated, and resolved with minimal manual entry. The power of the ECI product family becomes very real when you can watch the journey of a support issue pass from the DCA, to Printanista, to e-automate, DeskTech, and MobileTech, and be resolved.

2. Dealers focused on managed print services are actively preparing to move to Printanista

Since the launch of Printanista in 2021 we have been steadily onboarding users to the system. However, several discussions I had with customers still using our legacy FM Audit and PrintFleet systems helped me better understand the challenges and perceptions customers have around migrating their fleets to a new remote device management system.

Some dealers interested in transitioning from their legacy ECI remote device management systems to Printanista are proceeding cautiously with their plans because there is a pre-conception that transitioning to a new system entails re-deploying DCAs, configuring new alerts and reports, and training staff on a new system. So I’m glad I had opportunities to have these discussions and demonstrate how much ECI has already taken into consideration to help reduce the concerns of fleet migration to Printanista and help plan and execute Printanista onboarding. Supporting our legacy system customers has been a priority since Printanista was released, and I was happy to share more details of that support at the EUG conference.

For instance, FM Audit to Printanista is basically a simple upgrade. No new configurations are required, and your currently deployed DCAs are already supported.

Print Audit IDM and PrintFleet do require additional migration support, but many support tools have already been delivered. For instance, we offer a fully automated toolset for migrating IDM customer sites and settings to Printanista. Through the API, IDM shares customer data with Printanista to populate the new system and automatically install and configure the ECI DCA anywhere in your fleet where there is an ICE installed.

Migration support for Printanista continues to be a high priority for our customers; therefore, it’s important to me. Our goal is to help dealers move to Printanista with the least amount of disruption to their business.

3. Remote device support and diagnostics is a game changer

We received a lot of great feedback about Remote Device Link capabilities in Printanista. It was great to hear that our dealers who are leveraging the integration with Printanista and e-automate for service ticket workflows, and using Remote Device Link to diagnose and troubleshoot the device, are often able to completely resolve service tickets without rolling out the truck and sending a technician onsite (and sometimes even get the device working before their customer even knows there’s an issue). As a product manager, it’s incredibly rewarding to learn how the product capabilities that we conceived are making real-world improvements to our customers’ businesses!

4. There are opportunities to further optimize supply fulfillment

Cost control measures were a major topic in the many conversations I had with e-automate users at the EUG conference. The automation of supply orders, enabled by the integration between Printanista and e-automate clearly makes the process of getting toner to the customer faster and with less manual intervention. However, we had some great discussions about Printanista optimizing supply fulfillment workflows with predictive supply replenishment, enabling consolidation of supply shipments to help optimize shipping efforts and costs even more. I’ve had some great follow-up discussions since returning from EUG, and am really excited about the developments that are happening to further reduce supply shipping pain points for our dealers. This continues to be an area of focus in our product plans.

5. ECI customers are fascinating!

The EUG conference was such a fantastic experience and only helped confirm what I already knew—our e-automate customers are incredibly knowledgeable. They are technically savvy and incredibly skilled at developing workarounds to overcome obstacles within their workflows. It was a real pleasure to be able to dig deeper into their remote device monitoring challenges and visualize more opportunities to streamline workflows between Printanista and e-automate to help make their businesses run even better.

I want to thank all the ECI customers and vendors who took the time to meet with me at EUG. I received so much value from those few days we were all together. I'm really looking forward to the next one!

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