These days, the term “customer satisfaction” seems to be everywhere. Lots of people promise it and give lip service to it, but it’s not always delivered.  BERTL recently took a trip to the Lone Star State to look at an independent office-imaging dealership, Nevill Business Machines, where a zealous “Nevill Maniac” team really seeks to make “customer satisfaction” mean what it says—and prosper at the same time.

Nevill Business Machines is an independent dealership in Carrolton, Texas, located just outside of Dallas. Nevill, which was founded in 1975, has eight offices in Texas and Mexico. The dealership bills itself as a “one-stop-shop for everything and anything a business needs.” For fiscal year 2004, Nevill reported some $12 million in revenue.  It projects $15 million in revenue for fiscal 2007. The company offers products and services from Kyocera Mita, Sharp Electronics, the Hewlett-Packard Company, Canon U.S.A., and Oki Data.

Founded in 1975 as an independent dealership marketing Frieden Calculators, it began transitioning to typewriter sales and maintenance, eventually taking on copiers, then digital-imaging equipment for the office. In 1997, now Nevill CEO and President Reed Allan Melnick, purchased 50 percent of the business and became co-owner. In 2004, Mr. Melnick purchased the remaining half of Nevill and is now the sole owner. Since its founding, Nevill has acquired numerous copier dealerships throughout Texas and, more recently, in Mexico. 
 
Nevill Customer Talks to BERTL
BERTL also spoke to one of Nevill’s happy customers, Hudson Fetters of the Copy Shop in Corpus Christi, Texas. The Copy Shop recently purchased a Sharp MX-M1100 from Nevill. The MX-M1100 is a “light-production” black-and-white digital copier/network printer/network scanner that Sharp rates at 110 ppm. 

Fetters explains how his company acquired the MX-M1100, “We’d been talking about getting a faster machine for quite a while. We had four black-and-white machines, then we had a big project in August (2007). We had 300,000 copies to make and it really taxed our four black-and-white machines. When we began the second phase, I asked our (Nevill) sales rep about a faster machine, who recommended the (MX-M1100) machine.  But my financial officer here wouldn’t let us buy it. Our (Nevill) sales rep then came back with a better deal, and after begging my financial officer, we bought it.”

Fetters explains that Nevill technicians had the MX-M1100 up and running in an extraordinary short period of time. “We got it very quickly installed. We had it installed at 8 a.m. and the Nevill technicians had it running by 5 p.m. We started that job at 7:30 p.m. Friday night and we had made 460,000 copies by Tuesday afternoon. We had only two misfeeds during that 460,000-run, and it was because I overfilled two paper drawers.  It was remarkable … we’ve never run a machine like without any problems, and we’ve had all kinds of machines, such as Canon.”  He attributes the successful completion of the project to the MX-M1100.  “The only reason we accomplished the job is because we had the Sharp system.  Otherwise we would have failed.”

He explains that ordinarily the Copy Shop uses the Sharp system for walk-up work, except for when big jobs come in, at which point, the Copy Shop uses the MX-M1100.  “For us, the big job is 500,000 to 600,000 copies,” he says.  “The job has to be from two- to 300,000 pages for us to dedicate the Sharp system to it. We’ll have the same job in January at about 700,000 copies, and we’ll use the Sharp machine.”

Fetters explains that maintaining and using the MX-M1100 has been easy, “There’ve been no problems running the machine,” he notes. “We have it equipped with network scanning; we’ve used the network scanning, but not fax.”

Although very satisfied with the black-and-white MX-M1100, Fetters would like to see a color device from Sharp in the same speed range, noting, “Get Sharp to have a faster color machine.  They need to get it up to 75 ppm in color with the same quality.”

Nevill’s Yong Sharpe demonstrates Nevill’s N.Site+ customer Web to BERTL Director of Research and Analysis Terry Wirth.

Read the exclusive Reed Melnick interview in the next iTchat.