Sunday, April 18, 2010

Ricoh's PPDM enables and Epiphany for Eric the Office Worker


We all know about Eric the Office Worker right? For those of you who don't, Eric the Office Worker was featured here in three blogs. Eric the "Office Worker" Gets a Supra Wide Format!, Print Audit Green with "Eric the Office Worker" and Ecopy Desktop & "Eric the Office Worker".

Eric the Office Worker seems to have a proficiency for finding time saving software and hardware products in the office.

The last we heard of Eric, he was working for BetaAlpha Corp in Patterson, NJ, since then Eric the Office Worker has honed his job skills and landed a sales job in Frostburg, MD with DigDug Systems. DigDug has been around for almost 30 years and has four locations with about 80 employees.

Eric's job is to visit existing clients and seek out new clients to buy or lease heavy duty construction equipment.

In previous blogs Eric the Office Worker had been at three other firms in the past couple years and in two of those firms he instituted the use of Ecopy and Print Audit 6. If there's one thing that excites Eric, it's software that'll help him to cut the paperwork, save time and improve his efficiencies!

Being somewhat nosey and curious Eric had peeked over his cubical the other day when the new Ricoh copier was delivered, as a matter a fact he even asked his manager if he could sit in on the tutorial. Eric had been an old hand at copier technology and with his previous experience and thought he might be able to pick up something new. Giving it sometime Eric had thought... gheesh, this copier just got this new machine and all it does it print, copy, scan and fax??? What good is this he thought?

Just when Eric was about to retreat back to his cubical, the salesperson mention the "special function" key, with that Eric took notice and moved just a little closer to the system. The salesperson then directed the operator to enable the PPDM key, the operator did so and with that Eric moved a little closer to the system.

Just to cut to the chase go here for PPDM video

What really WOWED Eric is the fact that he could now walk to Ricoh multifunctional copier with hard copies and with the touch of a few buttons he was able to increase his productivity with a few of these key features!

• He could now walk to the copier and scan documents back to MS word or MS Excel, along with that he was able to enable a data capture on his lead forms, meaning he would scan the lead forms and the data would be extracted and captured into and Excel file, thus saving him countless hours of data input.
• Eric would also be able to scan his business cards with data capture, another huge time savings.
• But the greatest time saver for Eric was the ability to create fill able .pdf forms from the scanner, yeah Eric had all of the sales forms but they were either in an Excel which was a pain the butt to fill out because who ever made the forms had locked down certain cells and he couldn't change them, and then the pdf's were not fill able. Try doing this on ecopy without the fill able forms and this is a very mundane task.

Eric was elated with the initial PPDM demonstraion  and was excited that he was able to personalize his experience at the multifunctional copier and save countless hours with forms, MS word docs, MS Excel docs and fill able forms. Matter of fact the first item Eric did was to scan his leases, sales orders, maintenance agreements, lease documents, bill of ladings, return authorizations into fill able forms and then loaded them in his notebook. Eric also took a copy of his companies’ power point presentation and turned it into an audio presentation for his clients.  BTW, another great feature that Eric likes is the ability to convert a file to .pdf while just right clicking the document. No more opening the application and then coverting the doc to pdf! Awesome.

Hey, we all know Eric the Office Worker is a fictional character for this blog, however since Eric and I were turned on to PPDM, we really didn't have an idea how this technology would help us save time nor how to present it to our clients. My works of advice, if you have PPDM or something like it, lead it with it!  It's worth your time to become and expert with workflow solutions that will enable your customers to save countless hours with the mundane task of processing paper.

-=Good Selling=-

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Although I haven't worked in any copier company for many years due to my passion, and intellect, I spend most of my time, and money studying, and using and analyzing various copier systems, observing human-machine interactions, most of which are negative. One day I would like to train prospective users on how to leverage the positive aspects of systems.