MSE's Customer Care team provides technical support and logistical solutions and immediately responds to the needs of their customers via e-mail, phone and/or fax. "We feel it is important for our customers to have more than one point of contact," Avi said. "When a customer needs help, there is always someone willing to step up to the plate. In essence, we understand that post-sales support is as important as the sale itself."

As the market has evolved, so has MSE's image and customer-solution focus. The MSE Graphics and Marketing teams work together to educate MSE dealers about the strategic advantages of MSE.

"We do a lot of creative things to help our customers increase sales," Avi said. "We almost act like consultants who come in and help them grow their businesses. We offer a suite of sales and marketing materials to help our customers grow their businesses and educate their customers about the value of MSE products."

Continuous Improvement From Start to Finish

To engineer a new product, MSE's R&D department will start by benchmarking the OEM product. The company will buy the OEM printer, including variations of the printer to account for different speeds or duplex options. OEM cartridges are also purchased and their performance benchmarked to "make sure we know everything about the originals," Yoel said. "By investigating them (the OEMs) in detail and logging all of the pertinent information needed, we can have a complete understanding of the original design and start to create solutions before we even start building our own products. Sometimes, we find obvious OEM engineering flaws and that is where we excel."

MSE will also evaluate the standard cartridge manufacturing processes and see how MSE can improve upon it. Inside the MSE Machine Shop, custom cartridge fixtures and precision tools are designed and manufactured. This increases MSE's manufacturing efficiencies and ensures the highest percentage of component throughput for each model.

"Our engineers manufacture as many as 25 pieces of custom equipment for each new model," said Yoel. "We spare no expense to manufacture the highest quality products possible and in certain instances, MSE has proprietary components manufactured for us under exclusive arrangements."

Manufacturing instructions are then written on how to build cartridges the MSE way. Once these instructions are approved, every production line worker attends classes on how to build the cartridges - another example of the investment in both equipment and human resources. More impressive is the fact that MSE has more than twice as many Quality Control and Research and Development employees than salespeople. Yoel claims that, "Quality products will sell themselves."

Once the initial production runs are completed, the quality control team goes to work. Their goal is to evaluate what R&D has come up with and make suggestions on how to improve. "Our QC Team is our own in-house, independent testing laboratory," Yoel said. "Our philosophy is that they should be separate and independent of R&D in order to be unbiased. Sometimes they have different ideas or viewpoints on how to make the product better. In the end, our customers win because everything revolves around making our products better."