Ian Elliott
Market Intelligence
Reshaping the Office Products Industry: Delving into the Role of Technology in the Disruptor’s Path
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The office products industry is ripe for channel agnostic disruption. But first, the technology platform that eliminates barriers in the current value proposition must be deployed. This will then become the trigger for a disruption that will start in the transaction-dependent office products vertical before it moves on to overwhelm the equipment channel.
usiness transformation and disruption are overused terms we hear with ever-increasing frequency. It’s common for innovators to promote themselves as “the next big thing” while comparing their concepts to widely recognized disruptions such as Uber (paid ride) and Netflix (entertainment) industries that have already transformed. While it’s quite common for innovators to believe they’ve created the latest disruption, often this is not the case. While they may have developed a value proposition that provides incremental improvement, it’s far less likely the barriers that combine to block disruption will have been fully eliminated. A little more than 10 years have passed since we had to visit the local Blockbuster to rent a movie for the weekend. Then Netflix arrived and transformed the experience by delivering movies on demand directly into our homes. In doing so, they eliminated the time it took for us to get to and from the store, they removed the friction resulting from frequent supply constraints on popular new-release movies, and they wiped out late fees, the biggest source of profits in the legacy model. Amazon is also a disruptor because they transformed the shopping experience by removing barriers, causing the downfall of many high-street retailers who failed to respond to the threat. They use technology that presents the widest choice of products possible, the most-competitive prices and the fastest delivery. It has become unnecessary to physically go to the store, even if some of us still prefer to do so.
Disruptors are attracted to large, mature industries; typically, the players inside those industries cannot see or understand the threat of disruption until it’s too late. Usually, it takes an outsider who has a completely different perspective to come up with an alternative that will be adopted by the market. Regardless of how valuable a product, service or company has been in the past, loyalty rarely counts compared to the convenience or the benefits of other simplifications in the process that are introduced by a competitor. It is our view that the office equipment, products and supplies industry is ripe for a technology-led disruption event, one for which resellers are poorly prepared. The most-common technology platforms resellers operate on were built to support the way business was done in the past, but aren’t as adaptable to future market changes. • These platforms do little to help independent resellers survive the threat posed by Amazon and other online competitors. • While some may be evolving, there is little evidence of a movement toward technology designed to remove barriers built into the current value propositions. • They are incomplete solutions that do little to help technologically unsophisticated owners improve their online presence. • Lack of systems integration impedes the ability to convert raw data into actionable business intelligence. With more than 70% of buyers searching online for answers before engaging with a salesperson, it has never been more important for the independent resellers’ website to become a destination for addressing a potential buyers’ research.
Technology and the Digital Workplace
Technology is also disrupting the way people work. Though, Amazon or no Amazon, the process used to provide customers with the office products and services they need hasn’t changed substantially during the last 10-15 years. Furthermore, it is failing to adequately account for the ground-shift in how workers operate, where they operate from and how businesses are starting to adapt to these changes. 48
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www.enxmag.com | August 2019
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