2006 TechNO Expo

Mike Amberg
Sales manager
Marco

With the ability to copy, print, fax, scan, and e-mail, multifunction products enhance electronic communication, eliminate the need for multiple devices, increase efficiencies, and reduce administration costs. In addition, multifunction products are now integrating with back-end enterprise resource planning systems and many third-party software solutions to perform automated functions related to document management, security, and workflow. One of the features of multifunction products that we find of most interest to our clients is document security.

Due to legislative and data privacy issues, clients want to make sure their organizations’ data and intellectual property are protected. Most multifunction products store image data in memory such as hard drives. Unfortunately, the units’ hard drives can be accessed via the network, contributing to $60 billion in data theft every year, according to Sharp Corporation. Some multifunction products have security kits to protect the document data processed by first encrypting and then overwriting latent image data used in the system’s memory. This mitigates the threat and helps to protect the confidentiality of information. Up to 15 percent of    annual revenues are spent on document production and distribution, Hewlett-Packard reports.

Today, we are seeing almost 95 percent of businesses connecting multifunction products to their networks because of the many benefits and reduction in document costs.

Businesses are seeing the benefits of downsizing devices, streamlining efficiencies, and moving to a single vendor for their document distribution and output needs. John Barron, director of print services for the University of St. Thomas, anticipates a substantial savings in migrating to multifunction products. According to Barron, ‘We expect to save $29,000 each year the first two years into the program. Year three, we anticipate a savings of $80,000. Overall, for every 1 percent of prints that are migrated to multifunction printers, we expect to save $2,500.’

With the advent of digital technology several years ago, the copier has increasingly become connected to the corporate IT network. With this advancement, we’ve seen the convergence of copy, print, scan, and fax capabilities into one networked workgroup system. With the digital multifunction systems, you can also add capture and routing technology. They allow you to quickly scan in a document and e-mail it to anyone or save it to a document-management system. These significant advancements in office technology are improving document efficiency and lowering costs for today’s consumers.

We see customers embracing multifunction products. By implementing multifunction systems, customers often are able to dramatically reduce, or even eliminate, their desktop printers, outdated copiers, and antiquated fax machines. We see the trend toward multifunction systems continuing, given the value these systems provide for today’s businesses.