While m3i's aim is to redefine the MFD solution delivery business, Maestro's humble goal is simply to redefine the print & copy accounting genre...

Selectec has worked with a number of partners offering print & copy accounting solutions in the past. We have helped them with hardware and software integration and worked with them in the field to deliver complete solutions to customers. Many of these accounting systems have been in existence for some time and have evolved over time from basic print tracking to integrated print and copy accounting. While they achieved their initial goal, we were not convinced that they would be able to rise easily to the more flexible and granular cost monitoring required by the facilities offered by modern MFDs.

Our understanding of these systems also showed us that there was room at the lower end of the market for a simple, low-cost solution.  We resolved to redefine the print & copy accounting genre and take it to the next level. Our m3i platform gave us the opportunity to apply a more holistic approach.

We built Maestro, NOT as a print & copy accounting system but, instead, as an MFD Accounting system. Maestro is a suite of m3i components and user interfaces delivered in one package. Maestro brings together a number of advanced components to deliver something unique in the print & copy accounting market: it provides monitoring and accounting for any MFD aspect; it integrates MFD functionality with user information; it does this on multiple user interfaces, on different devices and for different environments; it can incorporate back-end customer data and much more. All this is standard, but if it doesn't quite fit customer requirements, it's all easily customisable.

Maestro, like any m3i system, has layers.

The UI layer provides a number of user interfaces designed as generic offerings in particular environments: Education, Legal/Accounting, Office, Public, Counter. Also, in its simplest mode, it can offer an advanced login screen for Ricoh Standard Features. These generic UIs can be tweaked to fit particular vertical markets: Education, Healthcare, Finance, etc. or can be customised for a particular customer and you can use different UIs on different MFDs in your organisation.

The middle layer, myAccount, contains the MFD connections, configuration and accounting logic. This is where you define who can do what on which MFD and how you want the system to work.

Finally, in the backend, you can choose which print & copy accounting system you prefer. myAccount comes with free accounting built in and a premium version for higher numbers of users. For enterprise environments you can link to PaperCut and others.

Key Features

• Fundamental changes in the way the user interacts with the MFD and the MFD Accounting system
• Fundamental changes in the way costs are calculated, presented and accepted by the user.
• These are delivered on multiple, collaborative, customisable UIs.
• Provides multiple UIs for different environments - commercial, public stand-alone, public operator-controlled.
• Back-end data is integrated directly into the various m3i components so that MFD Accounting is made a seamless part of the task being performed, not a separate login facility.
• Allows for expanding the solutions delivered and paid for on the MFD in the future - printing documents/photos from the web, scanning to web storage, etc.

This blog post explains how MFD Accounting on the m3i platform represents a new approach.

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