by Mark Schneider, Y Soft North America

You’ve optimized your customer’s printer fleet and are managing their consumption, servicing and output. Is that the end game? If your customers are not asking for more services to help them be competitive, they soon will be.

Under the broad term “business processes,” organizations are looking for ways to speed up business by replacing human intensive processes – like paper-based processes – with automated workflows. There are many reasons to do so and collectively they go under the umbrella of productivity. But it goes a lot deeper than that.

Before I go further, let me say that I am not advocating for a paperless office, nor replacing humans with machines. Far from it. There are reasons for office printing and scan to email. However, in many cases, there is a need to collaborate or repetitively process documents and manually copying, emailing and storing paper is not effective.

What are the productivity gains for your customers?

• Reduces human error. Think about the steps required to scan a paper document to email and how many errors can be made between the email arriving and it being downloaded from email, saved, shared and then stored. In industries where compliance regulations are required, human error can be costly and devastating.
• Finding documents. In healthcare, this is the biggest driver toward electronic patient records. Digital documents can be searched and found much faster than their paper counterparts. Additionally, it is faster to share with other physicians. This applies to any industry.
• Workflows can define consistency. Again, think back to the manual scan to email. The user has to decide many parameters: is it going to be a PDF or JPG, 200 dpi or something else, black and white or color. And, when they save it to their desktop, how will they name the file. Records management consistency becomes a huge problem. Workflows can dictate these parameters so the organization has accurate and consistent files.
• Automatic delivery to a pre-defined destination. Whether a company uses a cloud-based document repository, an on premise application or a simple networked file system, automated scan workflows can automatically send a digital copy to a specific folder or even create a folder in the defined destination.

This automatic delivery means the user has to only select the desired workflow (one touch of a menu) and then can shred the document. We call this scan and forget. The user doesn’t have to worry about anything once the scan workflow begins. All the things mentioned above happens without user interaction. This also solves a security issue. Scan to email means the user can send the document anywhere – unintentionally or purposefully to the wrong internal employees or external people.

And lastly, IT administrators know that storage required for mail servers is not at an insignificant cost. Files shared by email is an enormous strain on mail servers. Similarly, facilities doesn’t appreciate rooms full of boxes or file cabinets which could be instead used for much more productive use.

If you are looking for additional business process services to offer your MPS customers, look no further than the multifunction device where automated scan workflows can provide productivity increases. As customers look for ways to improve, they can find these services from a host of providers if they don’t see it offered from you.

Y Soft has created an eBook on automated scan workflows. We invite you to download The Power of Automated Scan Workflows and learn how simple using workflows are for users and how easy it is for print administrators to create dedicated workflows for paper-based processes.

Contact Mark at [email protected]