Improved document management guarantees financial return

Isle of Man Post Office is using Kodak scanners

UK companies are making optimum use of the latest scanning and printing technology to explore new business opportunities and reduce their own costs, as more firms look to outsource document management capabilities and internal print functions to external providers.

The Isle of Man Post Office integrated mailing services (IMS) division recently purchased three Kodak i1860 production scanners to handle a newly won three-year contract capturing documents for an undisclosed UK monthly magazine.

Each device has a retail price of around £53,000 excluding VAT, but is able to handle around 80,000 images a day in various different formats.

“The volumes required by the new client dictated that we needed something that is fast and reliable,” said Isle of Man Post Office IT manager Bob Fennell. “The documents we scan on behalf of that customer vary from a tear-off slip on the bottom of the page to full A3 documents, both single and double sided. I’d rather not talk about the size of those images in terms of megabytes, but the quality is basically set by the job itself, usually 200-300dpi.”

The publisher sends the IMS division a variety of forms, surveys, questionnaires and mail merge documents which after scanning can be printed, stored, and sent back in digital format and added to document management systems depending on specific requirements.

Delivered as a managed contract in association with Kodak partner Capital Capture, the new scanners use both Kodak’s own Capture Pro software and Autonomy’s TeleForm 10.2 image capture software which offers essential optical character recognition (OCR) and handwriting recognition technology.

“Handwriting is trickier to do as it becomes quite labour intensive, but we have offloaded it to providers in India,” said Fennell. “Three separate people key the information in, so accuracy becomes fairly high, though I cannot put an exact figure on it.”

Elsewhere, Capespan International, a company supplying fresh fruit and salad to UK supermarkets, is using the latest Xerox ColourQube solid ink multifunction devices (MFDs), which incorporate printing, scanning and faxing functions, to reduce its colour print costs.

The company removed individual desktop printers from its offices around eight years ago and replaced them with previous Xerox MFDs. After an office reshuffle, it replaced some of these with new Xerox ColourQube devices which feature solid ink cartridges that make them cheaper to run than laser equivalents.

“They give us better functionality for less money, particularly the 10 per cent usage colour coverage which costs the same as black and white printing,” said Jeremy Sykes, CapeSpan’s IT and network manager.

Capespan actually does little colour printing other than mast heads on letters and highlighted text in documents, though it does produce the odd high quality photograph of defective or decaying fruit for staff training materials. Even so, Sykes reckons the ColourQube devices have saved it around £2,500 in the first three months of 2010.

“Reducing the number of devices has helped, but we do not pay for ink – we pay a per sheet charge and find that even the cost of a mono print has come down by around 20 per cent,” he said.

The managed print services contract with Xerox partner First Choice Business Systems, now in its third renewal, will last for three years. Sykes has been consistently impressed by the reliability of Xerox MFDs which wayward end users find hard to tamper with or break.

“It works brilliantly for us and just involves one phone call to get whatever we need,” he said. “We look after anything from 100-140 users depending on the time of year, and we just do not have the time to chase around fiddling with printers or copiers.”

CapeSpan uses the Xerox MFDs for both copying and faxing as well as lots of scan to email jobs that produce PDFs which can be sent onto to colleagues and suppliers quickly.

“We used to have some very lazy users who would fax a document from one end of the building to another just to save a walk,” said Sykes. “Now we can just scan those documents to email and send them, which saves us a couple of hundred pounds a month just in fax and copier costs.”