MFP Solutions to the Table and Hardware will Follow!

I've had a few emails in recent weeks to try and get some threads in reference to solutions. There certainly are enough of them out there.

Just today I had an appointment with an IT Manager in New Jersey, company size is about 40 and they have numerous print, copy and fax devices.

The first thing I did was to ask for a tour of the facility. Once I had the ok, I fumbled for the pen and paper and we went to see all of the devices.

This is probably the best way to start any appointment when you're engaging with a new client, so much can be learned from seeing how the machines are placed, where they are placed, how they are used and what type of media is being used. You really can get a firm grip on how they use their machines.

When we arrived at one of the MFP's, I questioned the IT person if they are scanning the documents as search able pdf's. The answer I got was, "well we had looked at document management...", I then replied "was it the expense why you didn't move forward?", the IT Manager agreed and then stated the cost was $20K to get started. With that I brought up NSI Autostore explaining that that you can get NSI for around $1,200 or so and at least start converting all of your scanned images to search able .pdfs.

This Week in Ricoh "TWIR Notes"

Ricoh dealer, DocuSource, of Cerritos, California, announced that it has achieved Gold Solution Provider status from Hyland, for its success selling the OnBase document management software package. “We have consistently made investments in the growth of this business – in sales, marketing and most notably, technical resources. We are thrilled to see our efforts pay off” said DocuSource VP, David Kaye.

- Ricoh announced launch of version 2.0 of its Personal Paperless Document Manager software (PPDMv2):

o Manages paper documents, PDFs and MS Office files

o Assemble document by dragging and dropping pages from other documents (XPS, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, JPG, BMP, TIFF) to create new PDF

o Change, edit or markup PDFs

o Creates searchable PDFs with OCR engine

o Send or retrieve from MS SharePoint

o Convert files to Amazon Kindle

o Convert capture of text by digital camera into text file

o Auto highlight, redact, underline or cross-out by alphanumeric pattern search

Ricoh announced it will begin providing low-interest loans to employees in Japan to encourage them to make their houses more environmentally friendly (adding solar panels, etc.). The loans will be for 10 years in length at 4% interest.

In an interview in Computer Resellers News magazine, Ricoh U.S. president and CEO, Jeffrey Hickling, stated; “While a much larger share of our revenue comes from direct, we increased our investment in dealer support 50% in 2010”. “In what we’d call the midmarket and the commercial accounts, a direct coverage model alone can be prohibitively expensive”

-=Good Selling=-

Lead with MFP Solutions to the Table and Hardware will Follow!

I've had a few emails in recent weeks to try and get some threads in reference to solutions. There certainly are enough of them out there.

Just today I had an appointment with an IT Manager in New Jersey, company size is about 40 and they have numerous print, copy and fax devices.

The first thing I did was to ask for a tour of the facility. Once I had the ok, I fumbled for the pen and paper and we went to see all of the devices. This is probably the best way to start any appointment when you are engaging with a new client, so much can be learned from seeing how the machines are placed, where they are placed, how they ........... want to read the rest, go here Print4Pay Hotel Forums and become a member for free!

-=Good Selling=-

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=-