Drive Up Imaging Revenue By Driving Down Costs

Avoiding risk has become the overriding goal for many IT buyers. When your customer has to submit a high-speed scanning proposal for approval, he's going to be expected to justify that purchase with results that can be measured in real dollars. "The ability to show a better hard cost savings is going to be a differentiator between VARs," contends Scott Francis, scanner product manager at Fujitsu Computer Products of America (San Jose, CA). "A group of integrators can meet the requirements on a proposal, but the one who sees a way to drive an even greater return by going beyond the RFP [request for proposal] is going to be the one who wins. It's not just about scanning; it's about what you do with it. VARs need to be aware of all the new scanning solutions, including storage and software." Because end users are adopting a total cost of ownership approach, VARs need to look at how hardware and software choices can cut costs by reducing labor and allow high-speed scanners to truly operate at high speed.

Don't Overlook Maintenance Costs
Regardless of the rated speed, throughput, and duty cycle of the scanner, maintenance can erode productivity and an integrator's margins. "VARs have come to us with the feedback that more end users are looking at the total cost of scanning," states Russell Hunt, VP of sales for Bell & Howell Scanners (Chicago). "That means coming up with a formula that involves how the documents will be used, how often they can expect to replace the lamps or other consumables, downtime maintenance costs, and operator training costs." Resellers who provide their own service and support should already be doing this to create an accurate picture of the cost of providing service. After all, every time a VAR has to be on-site or on the phone, he reduces the margin he's making on the service contract.

Integrators may also want to avoid products requiring specialized knowledge for support. "If a VAR has to have a programmer in-house to support the system and the interface, it will be very expensive," says Robert Sbrissa, VP of sales at Imaging Business Machines, LLC (Birmingham, AL). "Products have to be based on standards to minimize support. The small integrators we see winning big contracts are focused on growing business and reducing risk, so having to deal with integration issues isn't in their best interest."

Scanners designed for field upgrades will also save money for end users and VARs. It gives end users easy access to the newest technologies that may help them drive even more value from a scanning operation. A field upgrade is an easier sale than the purchase of a new scanner, doesn't involve excessive downtime, and will require less time from the VAR.

Even routine issues can eat away at an end user's productivity and increase labor costs. "One of the trends we're watching is in transports," says Valerie Coffman, scanner sales manager at BancTec Document Solutions (Dallas). "How forgiving is the transport that moves the paper through the machine? Most scanners have a closed transport, but an open one allows for a 10-second recovery time compared to 25 seconds for a closed one. The other issue is flat or straight-through versus curved. A curved transport needs more operator assistance to remove staples, for example."

Meet Demand For Reduced Labor Costs
In addition to maintenance, there are other factors that can increase the labor involved in a document scanning operation. From document prep to QC (quality control), VARs can increase the value proposition by taking humans out of the process as much as possible. "Research we conducted during 2002 indicates the cry from end users is to help them reduce labor," says Coffman. "We found they will pay significantly more for hardware that will do that." Features such as operator-unassisted feeding mechanisms and double-feed detection become key selling points in this kind of environment.

Document preparation costs for activities such as sorting or removing staples can also add labor and slow the entire process. "One thing we're seeing is better paper handling," comments Hunt. "When organizations processing forms, for instance, have less paper preparation, that takes some cost out of their operations. One service bureau we work with reduced costs by 10% based just on less document prep."

In some instances, it is the physical sorting that comes after scanning that increases costs. Form recognition engines can be employed to automate the sorting of documents after the scanning process. These can range from elegant solutions such as unstructured forms processing to using colored highlighters to mark off certain documents as they are opened in the mail room. If the customer can scan a mixed batch, but an employee has to sort them afterward or remove separator sheets, they haven't really saved any money. "We've seen a demand for more output customizing," remarks Coffman. These features include pockets for document separation and stacking capabilities. Pockets can be used to sort out separator sheets or to create one stack of checks and another of remittance slips.

"Look at what can be incorporated at scan time such as patch codes, MICR [magnetic ink character recognition] lines, 2-D bar codes, ICR [intelligent character recognition], and more feature-rich data," advises Sbrissa. "If the bar code or color is recognized at the front end, efficiencies that can benefit the entire process are added at the back end." For example, if information is picked up at scan time and documents are sorted using some method of form identification, maybe only a subset will have to go to a key verifier. This reduces the labor costs and increases speed by reducing demand on the forms processing application.

Software Affects Scanner Performance
Francis points out that the true speed of the scanner relies on the software to which the images are conveyed. After all, what is the point of producing hundreds of pages a minute when they are getting bogged down at some point in the process because of image cleanup? "It's about the speed of getting it into the system," says Francis. "If people have to do key entry on four fields, how much faster can they go with auto indexing? In applications where manual indexing is a necessity, you have to have software support for multiple indexing stations and efficient routing."

Use Color To Automate Identification
A standard feature of most production scanners, color can be used to reduce post-scanning labor. In addition to form identification, color can be used to highlight certain fields (e.g. amount due is marked in yellow, account number marked in blue, etc.), allowing the software to find that data quickly. Once the field has been identified, the color can be dropped out to allow OCR (optical character recognition)/ICR.

No matter what size the customer, VARs base their businesses on relationships and customer service. However, a customer with the need and budget to implement a high-end scanner solution is also going to be the most aware of operational costs, so VARs have to know how to make it as cost-effective as possible. "Computing the true cost is where many customers and integrators do a poor job. It takes work to break down the cost per item, but that's what an organization should be looking at," observes Sbrissa. "Resellers are beginning to view a scanner sale as an opportunity to become much more involved in document processing and differentiate themselves by how many processes they can automate. Rather than simply coming to us with scanning requirements involving speed and throughput, we're seeing VARs look at the scanner itself as more of a solution, rather than just a component in a solution."