About

MZDP offers Avoravo: an automated service for formulating cost-optimised MPS solutions, even by non-MPS-experts. MPS is the industrial sector that offers printing as-a-service. Instead of buying printers most companies buy an MPS contract for 3-5 years and pay a fixed and often uniform price per copy, across printer models in the fleet. It has always been a struggle to close the inefficiency gap between provider’s margin and risk and customer expenditure. MPS design has been highly dependent on long and hugely manual work time of scarce experts, imposing a heavy cost over each project. Meanwhile customers are much wiser on providers’ techniques but also on their own needs, having experienced the pitfalls, eg overinvesting on low HW usage and problematic SLAs. Today more than ever MPS providers need to navigate around lower print volumes, turnover, and margins. Avoravo offers them the opportunity to design MPS plans that cover each customer’s wish-list and printing specifications, definitively minimising the total operational cost as well as mitigating risk from shifting print circumstances.

Solution & Product

We model a nonlinear location optimisation problem where a typical customer has several existing positions (slots) where clients can print. Each slot is associated with a print volume and must be served by a printer located in a zone inside a large floor or building; a zone for a printer might be a large subset of slots. The MPS provider is associated with a set of printers, each having printing limitations, fixed purchase cost and a printing cost that represents an irregularly formed nonlinear function. By applying a novel algorithmic framework our product provides a fast optimal solution that opens a set of zones and places a number of printers with the minimum total cost w.r.t. all limitations. The key-offerings of our product include optimal solutions in one step, efficient testing of unlimited scenarios and calculation/decomposition of cost per copy, a library of MFD devices with specs/costs easy to retrieve, single or multi-vendor option, extraction of eligible printers per zone.

Innovation & Scalability

To the best of our knowledge, our product offers the first approach that produces MPS solutions of optimal cost, enhancing the potential cost reduction compared to the current methods (our first sale, INTERSYS SA, have observed cost reduction up to 9%). Apart from cost savings, our algorithmic framework is very fast, computing optimal solutions in less than 1’’ for standard projects (up to 200MFD) and less than 20” for large ones (up to 2000 MFD). This is of huge practical importance, as MPS solutions currently require a few days of calculations by a team of 3-4 MPS experts. Contrary to usual limitations and errors of spreadsheet-based modeling that is mostly used in current practice, the increased computational efficiency of our product enables MPS providers to calculate actual costs for unlimited scenarios, in terms of different zone configurations, MFD selection or cost of consumables, all in split seconds, choosing a single or a multi-vendor option and thus, arming themselves with strategies not only for their offering but also for their competitors’. Interestingly, the created structure of input and output data, provided by users and computed by the optimizer, respectively, give rise to a novel business model which depends on the customer’s size (in slots) and strategic importance. On the other hand, the MZDP team already has more ideas to create products for the printing device monitoring market that will further boost efficiency using predictive analytics and AI.

Traction & achievements

MZDP received a USA provisional patent. As per patent search results, none of the listed patents were even close to the functionality of our patent. We already presented Avoravo to Hewlett Packard and Canon, top two vendors in MPS market, with enthusiastic reception and made our first sale to INTERSYS, leading MPS provider in Greece. Intersys won the two most demanding tenders of the banking sector, because of the speed and accuracy of the consultancy offered by Avoravo, as confirmed by end customers. Though COVID crisis challenged Intersys, as a print provider with plummeting print volumes, it was able to use Avoravo to offer fast business reviews to customers, re-optimize project fleets and automate trade-in campaigns, using half of the salesforce and only one solution designer so as not only leverage the crisis but take lead of competition. M2’s invitation, Europe’s leading MPS provider, to demonstrate Avoravo live at their premises in UK was an important step, awaiting fruition.

Team & Why Us

MZDP founders come from the Academic and Business worlds sharing a passion for bridging the two. They share Math and OR skills (mathematical modeling, discrete, data-driven and robust optimisation algorithm design, predictive and prescriptive analytics) and SW that supports optimisation processes, training at the highest level and claim proven business acumen. They are highly experienced on cutting-edge technologies for data handling, authentication, business logic, and on technologies that support optimization. They all have worked in the printing business for many years or have taken part in the commercialization of optimisation solutions. Still after 20 years of MPS industry, there is no product in the world that does what Avoravo does. Our “competition” at best addresses peripherally the issue of design, using graphical interface (digitized floor plans etc.) or click cost databases to assist the designer with assessing the customer’s current and future state. The potential allocation of end users to printing devices is tried out by effectively manual iterations which take long and is therefore short-cutted by empirical notions of print professionals. Assuming 10mio contractually monitored MFDs (tracked by Infosource or IDC) our growth potential all the way to 50% penetration and with 30% channel margin, i.e 15,000,000 EUR per year from this platform alone as it stands today.

Funding Needs

300K for Development resources, infrastructure, business development.