David Preston, Canon South Africa’s Managing Director.
South African private and public sector organisations can use printing technology to support digital transformation, increase security and compliance, and lower business costs.
David Preston, Canon South Africa’s Managing Director, believes that local businesses are missing out on opportunities to modernize their business processes and streamline their operations.
Preston says that, despite all the talk about paperless offices a decade back, most organizations still use paper documents. “The public sector, in particular, still relies heavily on paper documents. This can slow down processes and impact service delivery. Another challenge for public sector organisations reliant on paper documents is that those documents are stored in massive archives, which are not in a searchable format.”
South Africa’s government agencies are recognising the disadvantages of this, with departments such as Home Affairs recently announcing plans to digitise over 350 million inactive and active paper records for easier handling and storage.
Preston says: “A number of countries have strong digitisation agendas and have made significant progress in terms of giving citizens easy access to digital services, and when required, the ability to print out important documents securely. Driving a digital agenda should be a priority, and printing and scanning is a massive part of that.”
Printing gets smart
Preston states that scanning and printing innovations have made devices multifunctional, smart and indispensable in the digitally transformed workplace.
Smarter scanning and printing integrates digital and paper documents into workflows and databases, supporting collaboration as well as mobility. Now users can scan, print, scan, access and retrieve documents anywhere. They can also share scanned documents to any device, cloud, or on-premises.
Preston says: “In Europe, smart printing devices are a standard part of office infrastructure. Organizations pay more attention to security management and smart devices provide tools for monitoring and managing network printing and scanning. Printing anything has been a way of life for people in the past. This can cause problems and put sensitive data at danger. Smarter devices allow IT departments and procurement officers to understand who prints what, and the costs associated with this. They can also put restrictions in place around what people can or can’t print.”
Smarter devices enable distributed and hybrid workforces, regardless of their location, to be more productive and efficient by integrating with secure cloud document management solutions and remote monitoring and management by IT.
With AI, such as Canon’s IRISXtract software, smarter devices can recognise and categorise documents of all types, then extract relevant information such as the customer name, PO and addresses of an invoice and turn them into digital records.
Smarter printing integrates seamlessly with mobile devices. Mobile users and hybrid workers are looking for easier ways to scan and copy wherever they are. Mobile apps such as Canon’s PRINT app teams a smartphone or tablet with a printer via WiFi for easy scanning and printing, and for checking printer ink status or managing device maintenance remotely.
Preston states that the evolution of a simple printer to a smart multifunctional device has created opportunities for organisations to improve their efficiency. “Printers have gone from ‘dumb slaves’ in the 1980s to devices with PC-like capabilities, with a great deal more functionality and intelligence, which support security and compliance, collaboration, efficiency and productivity.”