The Future of Documents

Vacation are great, but you sometimes miss important news like this one.

Canon recently announced the acquisition of 17% of IRIS group SA. IRIS is a well known player in Intelligent Document Recognition, but also to some extent in Entreprise Content Management. Canon and IRIS had started their relationship around IRIS’s latest scanning software suite, which is used for electronic archiving and compression.

This is another example of a traditional hardware (print and scan-) company moving into document management solutions, and enabling a tighter connection between their Multi-Function Devices / scanners and their customer’s paper-intensive workflows. The next logical step might be, just like Xerox Global Services, to strengthen its Services offering beyond simple Managed Print Services, into Pofessional Document and Business Process Services, including generic Imaging and Document Management Services, or more specialized services such as Client Acquisition and Lifecycle Management, Finance and Administration Services, or Mortgage Services.

It is interesting to compare with Océ, who moved the opposite direction by selling its Océ Document Technologies to Captaris about 1.5 years back.

So, which model is right – Océ moving away, or Xerox, and gradually Canon, moving into Document Management and Business Process Services? Time will tell – I have an idea, but I might be biased

Interesting love and hate relationship between the U.S./state governments and paper, as reported in a few articles on Greenbiz.

On the one hand, a study of the U.S. government shows that $440 million out of the $1.3 billion, is “wasteful” or transient paper usage.

The “2009 Government Printing Report” is full of very interesting numbers and facts. For example:

•  it is estimated that a Federal Employee discards 35% of printed pages the very same day, which ends up being 2,520 pages per year – or 6.6 billion pages each year.
• 54% of the employees or not aware of the cost involved in printing.
• the main rationales for printing documents are signatures (57% of respondents), need to review / share (51%), preference towards editing on hardcopies (41%) .

More surprising facts include that 38% of respondents still use paper to file / archive, but also that Gen Y workers have almost the same behaviour towards printing paper than older generations (print and discard almost the same).Anyway, lots of interesting facts that are worth reading through.

On the other hand though, the state of Washington is leading the way towards sustainable and responsible printing by edicting a very aggressive green printing law. By using only recycled paper, enforcing double-sided printing, and launching paper conservation programs, the state wants to achieve a reduction of 30% in printing by next year, but also saving $1 million to state taxpayers, and saving around 43,000 trees and 15.7 million waters.

One thing we should note is that this “over-waste” of paper is not specific to government agencies. Many large and medium companies still do not know how much they spend on printing, and the figures are often the same order of magnitude or even above those listed above. And, it is not only about paper – it is also about carbon footprint and energy consumption of your print infrastructure, about toner usage and waste generated by the devices, and about lost efficiencies due to paper travel – all of which you can read more in the Less Paper Office White Paper.

 In any event, whether a government agency or in the private sector, you should investigate Smarter Ways to Green if you are serious about reducing your impact on the environment – while lowering cost. Click on the image below to learn more.

Did you know that on average, your company is spending between 3 and 4% of its revenue producing documents, which represents on average $3,400 per employee? Would saving 30% of these costs be interesting? How about, at the same time, reducing your paper consumption by 30-40% and reducing drastically the energy consumption?

Welcome to Managed Print Services. More information, along with very interesting case studies, can be found in this very good article from the Wall Street Journal. It describes “the new business of printing”: moving from a “print more” business model driven by toner, paper and office device sales, to a “print less and better” model targeting reduction in device and usage, and more responsible use of printing - the “Less Paper” office.

Xerox is leading the way (closely followed by HP) of the Managed Print Services market. This market is growing 36% this year, according to Ed Crowley, president of Photizo Group.

Interested? To get more information on Xerox Office Services, you can check out this little video.

Xerox Office Services quick video

Besides the use case stories of a P&G or a 3M cited in the article, I’d like to hear use case stories from my readers, and what benefits they were able to reap owing to Managed Print Services. Tell me about your own experience!

In the latest version of Gartner’s Managed Print Service Quadrant, Xerox is positioned in the leaders quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period.

This is a owing to the Xerox Office Services offering, which helps your organization gain control of processes and costs for document output. Xerox manages all of your office printing devices – such as printers, copiers, and fax machines – regardless of manufacturer or model. Productivity, cost savings, but also carbon footprint keep improving through the continuous improvements that your fleet is undergoing.

In other words, a key contributor to the Less Paper Office, which is supported by a mix of people, processes, and bleeding edge technologies, but also cool research like social networking for printers.