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How Can a Scanning Workflow be Created on a Copier?

 

What is Workflow?

 

Workflow is the movement of documents and information throughout an organization in-order to make decisions and complete any required processing that they create".

 

I found this on the FileBound site.

 

I know that most of my clients are using their multifunctional copiers to scan, but it wasn't until the launch of the new Ricoh Metis multifunctional copier series that I felt that I needed to dig deeper with my prospects and clients about how they are using the scanning on the copier.

 

Most of my clients are small to medium size businesses. Lately, I've been asking additional questions that are related to scanning. Mind you I don't want this to be a long drawn out blog (I hate those and won't finish reading them), so I'll try to cut to the chase with some bullet points on what I've discovered.

 

  • Many prospects and clients (from here I will call them users) do not know what a searchable .pdf is.
  • Many are not aware that they can change the DPI settings when scanning a document.
  • Many are not aware that they could also scan as a .tiff image or a .jpeg.
  • Most users are scanning to their email account or to a folder on their pc and then renaming the file and moving the file to a location on the server or another pc.
  • Many users are not aware that they can now scan to their favorite apps.
  • Many users are not aware that they can scan the document(s) to multiple scan2email addresses and folders.
  • Most users are not using any type of document management system.
  • Some users have predefined folders that they scan the documents to.

Back to the question at hand "How Can a Workflow be Created on a Copier?"  For one of my clients I uncovered that one of the documents that was scanned on a daily basis consisted of 15 pages and some of those pages were had imaging on both sides of the paper. The users liked the idea of the document being converted to a searchable pdf (keep in mind that I've found that in order to have better accuracy with converting a document to a searchable .pdf that we need to scan that document at a resolution of 300dpi or higher), they would like to file to be sent to a folder on the net work and then also be emailed to two other people in their department.

 

Thus, with our Ricoh multifunctional copier I was able to design a scan workflow with the copier, With the Ricoh systems that I work with I was able to set the scanning to auto two sided, increase the scan resolution to 300dpi, turn on blank page detection, turn on OCR, and then select two email addresses from the address book and one folder location on the server to deliver the documents.  When I had all of the settings correct, I was then able to save the settings in a program mode and then place a short cut on the home screen and then name the program.  Thus what I created was a simple workflow from the copier that can be accessed with a one touch button.  

 

I wanted to keep this short and to the point, digger deeper and understanding your customers scan process can help you uncover some redundancies or pain. This one process saved almost this one user almost 10 minutes for each day of the week, and almost 4 hours for the month, imagine if you uncovered five or six different scanning workflows that saved the customer 10 minutes each at 6 times a day!  Add it up and that's almost a 40 hour work week.      

 

Many of you may be doing this now, and many may not, but we can all agree that scanning with multifunctional copiers is playing a more important part in how our customers and prospects use our devices.  

 

I understand that there can be more elaborate workflows with scanning documents to document management systems, extracting data, naming conventions, and meta data. Sometimes it's best to keep it simple, gain their trust, bring a new client on board and we can then go back and help them with more elaborate workflows in the future.

 

-=Good Selling=- 

 

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Comments (1)

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FYI:
Most IT managers don’t like scanned documents sent using email or saved in Exchange.
Exchange is not a document management systems.  Attaching, replicating and storing large files can cause issues.
Preferred method is to scan to folder or directly to the DM solution if that is an option.

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