Managed.IT - issue 52

28 MANAGED.IT 01732 759725 SCANNERS Managed IT (MIT): How are scanner sales? Is demand still strong? Brian Fortune (BF): Scanner sales are relatively stable, if not slightly growing, in volume terms. There are a lot of things driving the requirement for the scanning and capture of images. One, which organisations don’t have a choice about, is compliance. In the future there is likely to be even Scanning to the cloud Independent regional airline Flybe has transformed the management of maintenance documents in its Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) division by integrating Fujitsu N7100 network scanners with DocuStore cloud-based document management from InSite Data Systems. Instead of having to post maintenance documents off- site for manual processing, engineering teams in aircraft service bays now scan them directly into DocuStore at point of use, reducing the time needed to review and approve paperwork from 20-30 days to less than 24 hours. Every time an aircraft enters a maintenance bay, review and repair activities generate significant quantities of paperwork. If documents are lost, an airplane cannot be returned to service, so improving the efficiency of document capture not only speeds up the approval process but reduces the business cost of misplaced documents. To simplify the capture, identification and processing of documents (and to provide an audit trail showing who has scanned, checked and approved every document), Flybe has integrated customisable, ‘one touch’ N7100 scanners with its document management system. Now, all engineers have to do is log in at a scanner; select the pre-configured scan job shown on the touch-screen display; check the scan preview to confirm pages have scanned correctly; and press save. Scans are automatically saved as a multi-page PDF in the network file store. Nicholas Gorton, Production Support Manager at Flybe, said: “The improvements in scanning and archiving are immense. We have been able to speed up the delivery of completed maintenance data to our customers from 20-30 days to 24 hours and the quality of scans and our ability to search within documents have had a positive impact on our efficiency.” Nimesh Desai, Implementations Director at InSite, added: “The ability to connect the Fujitsu N7100 directly to a network without the need for a PC meant it integrated perfectly with Flybe’s thin client architecture, while the ability to customise the scanner’s touch screen interface enabled us to deliver a simple, efficient user experience. The compact design and price point of the N7100 allows the installation of a distributed fleet of scanners ensuring that documents are captured as they are completed, eliminating the risk of loss and speeding up the approval process.” more regulation around how the UK interacts with Europe and the world. Companies must make sure new hires have the right to work in this country and our technologies are being used to capture, record and ensure compliance in relation to that. GDPR is massive as well. Organisations need to secure the information they hold about people and it is much easier to do that if they are in digital rather than paper form. Then there is business transformation. One of the low hanging fruits in any organisation is to look for the paper. Organisations will try to remove paper wherever they can by making deep changes to processes, but even just taking paper, digitising it and triggering workflows based on that can significantly change how organisations work and interact with customers and suppliers. Then, there are things like Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Imagine a scenario where scanning an invoice and extracting the information it contains triggers a myriad of different processes that require no human intervention. Instead, a machine makes rules-based decisions, providing consistency throughout an organisation and reducing the potential for error. These sorts of thing are driven by digitisation, whether the content is created digitally or converted from a paper document by scanning, so we are optimistic about the future for capture. MIT: What, right now, are the big growth areas for you? BF: We see significant growth in workgroup/departmental devices. In the past, organisations would capture documents centrally and have someone responsible for Following news that Fujitsu has shipped its five millionth ScanSnap scanner, Managed IT asked Brian Fortune, General Manager Sales at PFU (EMEA), about the benefits of distributed scanning Look for the paper The technology is so intuitive that people whose main focus is something else entirely can easily use it InSite DocuStore - N7100 Operation After logging on, the user is presented with one button for each ScanJob defined in the addinN7100InSite.config file. Scanning starts as soon as the user touches one of the job buttons. If the user presses the hardware Brian Fortune