Are you a business that is in the manufacturing, distribution or selling of a product or service?  Does your company generate invoices?  This sounds like a very silly question, right?  Obviously, the answer to this is “YES” or you wouldn’t be in business!

After consulting with several companies, I’ve come to realize that there are some who have a great understanding of how to manage the processfor printing and distributing their documents (ex: invoices, pick tickets, purchase orders, and mission critical documents, etc).  On the other side of the fence there are companies who do not manage this process at all.  In discussing the latter, this is usually due to one or more of several factors:

1. They have a legacy or back-end system that runs the business (AS400, MS DOS system).  These companies usually print all of their invoices on 3-part forms with loud impact line printers.
2. Change. Sometimes it’s hard to let go of a process that might have been in place for 30+ years.  Printing to impact printers, manually collating forms for distribution, filing copies in filing cabinets are time-consuming and out-dated.   The new way is to print to a low-cost device or not print the document at all!  Sending invoices electronically, auto-archiving copies, electronically routing information to other departments is where business is going.  It’s not only more cost-effective and saves your organization time, but it’s better for the environment too.
3. Cost. Rarely is moving to a new system not cost justified.  There are benefits that you may not have even considered such as employee productivity and pure dollar savings(lower cost imaging device, less paper, less electricity, etc.).

Let’s take a look at this more in depth and paint a better picture.

Considerations: Forms are extremely expensive,  line printers are slow and expensive to maintain.  Some of these 3-5 part forms can cost 35 cents a piece (depending on how complex they are).  Why not print to a low-cost plain paper device for under a penny a page or in some cases not print the form at all?

Potential Solutions:  Have a specialist consult with your business on your specific requirements.  They can help you find a solution that is right for you, such as finding a way to implement your existing, expensive back-end legacy system!  Implementing a software solution that can take this raw/ascii text data from your legacy system and place it into a newly created form is possible.

The Result:  All invoices are printed on plain paper at a fraction of the cost.  Additionally, you can determine whether you should route these invoices electronically to document management software (step #3 in diagram) for archiving, for customers e-invoicing, for routing to another department (ex: automatically route to warehouse to pick a part).

If this sounds like your organization you may want to consider forms management and document distribution software such as Prism DocForm or ObjectifLune PlanetPress. Also, make sure you talk with an experienced, professional vendor.  Selecting a vendor who is knowledgeable about looking for opportunities to help improve your business processes and reducing unnecessary costs is key.

Image Source:  Prism DocForm

By: Rob Sethre

An interesting article appeared recently which is relevant for the imaging industry.

For the first time in its history, Amazon sold more electronic books for their Kindle product than hard copy books. While this development is inevitable (eventually), it was remarkable for several reasons:

• Speed - Now? Already? That was fast! If anybody was watching the divergent trends of digital and analogue cameras at the time, they will recall that transition took place at a more leisurely pace. Years of anticipation preceded the actual event.
• Magnitude - this was not a case whereby the electronic books just barely edged out hard copy sales. Over the past quarter, Amazon sold a whopping 143 e-books for every 100 hard copy books sold. In fact, it appears that the pace is accelerating: in the last four weeks, the ratio increased to 180:100, nearing a two-to-one ratio.
• Competition - this boom took place during the launch of Apple’s iPad, which theoretically might have deflected sales away from Amazon’s Kindle product. Evidently not, at least as far as e-book sales went (Amazon does not publish Kindle hardware sales numbers).

Incredible. Sudden. A milestone. So what does this mean for the printing and imaging industry?

If we pursue MPS engagements aggressively and digitize more and more documents and workflows, how (and how quickly) will hard copy output be displaced? If this “inevitable” development is coming faster and stronger than many have been anticipating, how do we plan and time the shift?

One answer is that we need to be tracking and sizing the market constantly to anticipate such major developments. There was also an interesting sub-story: this development was in fact not the result of pure displacement. While industry (not only Amazon) e-book sales quadrupled in the past year, total hard copy book sales increased as well, by a healthy 22%. The first datapoint, digital book sales, is clearly driven by the maturity of the technology and broader consumer acceptance. But what drove hard copy sales? There may be a demographic component supporting short-term continuity, or actual usage patterns may be shifting – for example, favorable availability and pricing trends may have conspired to expand the average personal library.

Either way, the intriguing fact embedded in this article is that hard copy sales have not (yet) started to diminish – a new and highly complementary technology just continued to grow at a much faster pace.

Certainly there is a message in there for the imaging community as well.  The book business represents, first and foremost, consumer trends, and we must be cautious about extrapolating expectations to the world of business imaging. But there are technology and usage overlaps, and there is no reason to rule out the possibility that the same patterns may emerge as well.

One sensible response is to take care not to be locked into the hard copy world. The user organization has to be the consumer with a hard copy library as well as a Kindle (iPad, etc.). Vendors have to be like Amazon, who most certainly does not care whether that last book sold was hard copy or an e-book. They just want to be the source . . .

Due to the popularity of our recent post on copier security, we have decided to feature information from Toshiba on how exactly to secure the data on an e-studio MFP hard drive. Protect your stored documents with 128-bit encryption and Key Code access.

The Process:

• Documents are sent to System Board
• System Board converts documents and sends them to the appropriate output for printing, copying or scan  to PC
• Scrambler board encrypts data and sends to hard drive
• Documents can only be recovered from the hard drive using the encryption code which is unique (128-bit)

Feel free to contact us about this procedure.

With the convergence of digital imaging and printing technologies, nearly every digital copier or MFP built since 2002 contains a hard drive; just like the one on your personal computer.  These hard drives store an image of every document copied, printed, scanned, or emailed by the device.  The intention of this design originally was to improve the information processing and handling ability of a digital copier or MFP. However, according to a recent report from CBS, nearly 67% of workers today do not even know the copier/MFP contains a hard drive.  Furthermore, even more people don’t know the potential security risks that this presents…including IT professionals.

HOW DOES THIS APPLY TO YOU?

Is your company making sure its data is safe? Do you know who has access to what files?   Nearly 85% of all business class copiers/MFP’s are acquired through a lease and at the end of the term (but in most cases prior) you, your current vendor, or a new vendor return the equipment to a leasing company. Most customers and vendors today do not have a formal process in place that ensures the hard drives are wiped of any sensitive or confidential information.

CBS News investigated the issue of digital copier security and found stunning results.  During their investigation, they uncovered that it only took 30 minutes to pull the hard drives out of the copiers. Then, using a forensic software program available for free on the Internet, a scan was done – downloading tens of thousands of documents in less than 12 hours.

Excerpt from CBS “…It wasn’t until hitting ‘print’ on the fourth machine – from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, that we obtained the most disturbing documents: 300 pages of individual medical records. They included everything from drug prescriptions, to blood test results, to a cancer diagnosis.  A potentially serious breach of federal privacy law. “You’re talking about potentially ruining someone’s life,” said Ira Winkler. “Where they could suffer serious social repercussions.” Winkler is a former analyst for the National Security Agency and a leading expert on digital security. “You have to take some basic responsibility and know that these copiers are actually computers that need to be cleaned up,” Winkler said.

TAKE ACTION

What choices do you have?  Most office equipment suppliers and manufacturers will tell you that their copiers/MFP’s come with accessories such as “hard drive encryption” kits.  But this is a shallow response and does not insure a real process to protect data AFTER your lease has ended and equipment returned.  What your current or future supplier must do is PROACTIVELY inform you of a process they have in place that erases the hard drive and verifies that your data has been removed. This is simple and in most cases, a process that carries no additional cost. Contact us today to learn more!