This year over 1.2 million office multifunction systems will be installed in the United States and the movement continues to grow. These systems provide printing, copying, faxing, and scanning features in one cost-effective device.
The basic logic behind these systems is obvious: it is just practical to combine these similar functions for cost savings and fewer devices to supply.
However, some of the largest reasons behind the rapid implementation of these systems extend beyond cost savings. Multifunction devices can merge with document management software to allow process automation and deliver bottom line results.
Modernized Communication: Multifunction systems email, fax and print together. Scan to email functionality delivers paper documents securely to their recipients as email attachments. Fax routing directs incoming faxes to email addresses.
Automated Business Processes: Multifunction systems offer a convenient on-ramp to get paper onto a digital network. New capture software provides the technology for information to be read from scanned documents where it can be routed through a pre-defined workflow.
This is the challenge businesses face today—to take fragmented repositories of information and combine them into one, concise system. From copiers and fax machines to Microsoft Office and email, we expect these technologies to make our life simpler. Instead, they can tend to make it more complex.
Enter Document Management Programs
Many small businesses and corporate departments are enjoying the benefits of new document converging technology. Paper, digital and email documents are finally able to be handled by one system.
- Scanners and Multifunction Systems enable the rapid conversion of paper documents into common digital formats like PDF files. These documents can be sent as email attachments our directed to a network folder.
- Optical Character Recognition technologies convert scanned text into editable text. Documents can be scanned directly into applications like Microsoft Word where they can be edited.
When considering the many costs that an organization has to expend, one of the most misunderstood is that of printing costs.
The Gartner Group estimates that as much as 30% of organizations' print costs can be eliminated with simple technology solutions.
The Business World is a rapidly changing entity, and technology helps adapt to these changes quickly and will help a company keep its competitive advantage. Paper has always been an inefficient medium for conducting business processes, and recently has become a key focus for Business Process Improvement (BPI) initiatives. So what are the main reasons for a company or organization to move towards the paperless environment?
Below are the two main categories:
1. Operation Efficiency and Business Process Improvement
Using a digital repository can improve productivity. This is an obvious benefit. Any time you can reduce the time required to perform a required task, that time can be applied elsewhere. A basic online search for a customer file requires about 5 seconds. To accomplish the same information lookup with a physical file cabinet can take 10 – 25 minutes, or perhaps even days if the file is held in offsite storage. This is just for basic lookups, and not complex searches, which could take weeks if performed through the physical file system.
