On document management

Som Gangopadhyay, Assistant Director, Marketing, Canon India, gave us details of some best practices in document management.

Som Gangopadhyay

According to various sources, more than 70 percent of the world’s information is now digital. In 2000, we saw the Internet boom and easy access to information. By 2001, email became the principal mechanism for communicating in offices. All these are important in every office today. Som Gangopadhyay, Assistant Director, Marketing, Canon India, talked about some best practices in document management to meet all the above requirements effectively.

Says Gangopadhyay, “Though companies have assessed their imaging and output infrastructure with the goal of optimising their hard copy deployment, few understand how to leverage document distribution, document management and technological advances in hard copy devices.”

According to IDC research, among organisations with 1,000+ employees, most of them do not know how many hard copy devices are in the enterprises. Less than half (48 percent) routinely track hard copy costs company-wide. Less than a third (31 percent) track IT help-desk and support costs related to hard copy.

As a result, organisations are incurring excessive costs for extra footprints, supplies, maintenance and help desk support because printers, copiers and fax machines are not managed properly.

“Failure to digitise and streamline critical business processes costs organisations in employee productivity, labour costs, and missed/slowed revenue collection,” says Gangopadhyay.

“No single department can ensure that hard copy devices are optimally deployed in an organisation. Organisations have been slow to deploy network-connected multifunction printers (MFPs) while continuing to maintain underutilised copiers and fax machines,” he adds further.

The MFP advantage

In recent years, MFPs have experienced significant advances in the areas of document distribution and management, security, wired and wireless connectivity, and colour. The scan-to feature on MFPs is an effective way to bring documents into a digital workflow.

Security of documents is another big challenge that is taken care of by MFP. Secure transmission of electronic documents has become very important in the healthcare and banking industries, and in functional areas such as finance and legal as a result of recent legislation.

MFP enables documents to be printed, emailed or faxed securely by encrypting the print datastream at the point of sending (from a PC, MFP or scanner), and decrypting it at the receiving hard copy device.

Cost savings

According to an IDC report, by implementing a managed imaging and output environment, companies have achieved direct cost savings of 13 to 40 percent, and significant indirect cost savings. Average cost savings were 23 percent, broken down as follows:

• 40 percent from reduced IT support costs for printing/copying/faxing/scanning user issues
• 25 percent from reduced costs for consumables
• 20 percent from reduced costs for print/copy/fax/scan repairs
• 10 percent from reduced costs to install and upgrade hard copy devices
• 5 percent from reduced hard copy device equipment costs

Cost savings are cited as the greatest benefit followed by employee productivity. IDC report say that 71 percent improvement in document workflows and smoother business operations could be achieved through the use of MFPs for document distribution and management.

Gangopadhyay answered all queries that were put up. He suggested the scanning of paper documents into digital archives, storing all documents in one place, organising in a simple and logical way, searching for a document by index, attributes or text; retrieving from personal and shared archives and folders, and creating professional reports and quotations.