Konica Minolta South Africa, a division of Bidvest Office, has announced that it is complementing its comprehensive product portfolio with new powerful software solutions for varied office and production printing applications, providing seamless integrated solutions for all business areas.

“Office technologies have advanced, users’ needs have changed – but many of today’s printing environments are patchworks of printing, imaging and fax devices that aren’t managed or serviced to keep up with today’s business world,” Mohammed Vachiat, software product manager at Konica Minolta South Africa points out.

“Most everyday work routines that focus on the creation, printing, distribution, management and archiving of information are both cumbersome and time-consuming – and it is high time to transform this in all organisations,” he continues. “Although ongoing digitisation has made work procedures faster and easier, relieving employees of many mundane and repetitive tasks, true efficiency throughout the entire business can only be achieved with elaborate process automation and the optimisation of document and record workflows.”

To achieve this, Vachiat explains, the right software solutions need to be selected, individually adapted and combined with innovative hardware that manages the input and output.

It is here that enterprise content management (ECM) can assist.

By enforcing the re-evaluation of business strategies and processes, ECM can help companies to work faster and smarter, while also improving daily work and reducing costs.

A key advantage of ECM is the improved security measures it brings to the data; allowing a business to understand where its data is located and how to access it when needed. Paper-heavy businesses in particular run a high risk of losing information or being compromised in some way. The misfiling of documents is also a huge cost for companies – between two and five percent of an organisation’s files are misfiled or lost every day, equating to hours of lost productivity. ECM tools can offer different levels of security for different types of content it manages, ensuring that only authorised users can access documentation. These security levels also apply to scanning jobs completed on printing devices.

Furthermore, ECM is extremely useful when it comes to compliance and governance. Increasing levels of compliance regulations, like the local PoPI Act, are making keeping track of documents more important than ever before, a difficult feat for paper intensive environments.

Konica Minolta South Africa’s extensive new portfolio of software applications, are accompanied by diligent business process consulting, not only to optimise existing structures and workflows, but also to assist in creating and set up entirely new work cycles.

These applications include:

·        Document capture and management – the application digitally captures paper-based information and manages documents and records for business processes.

·        Security – the software safeguards documents throughout their whole life cycle and provides effortless management of access rights.

·        Connectivity – the application seamlessly integrates output devices into existing IT landscapes based on data stream conversion.

·        User and cost management - enhanced print cost transparency is easily achieved with the central management and budget control application of work groups and cost centres.

·        Output management – the software provides central management of print queues and their properties to balance print loads and direct output based on corporate print policies.

·        Device management – here, the application enables centralised monitoring of device and consumables status, providing automated deployment of device settings and thus keeping administration effort to a minimum.

·        Cloud and mobile printing – new software provides easy printing from any mobile device in either a public or semi-public environment.

“Today’s organisations are constantly being challenged to find new ways to streamline processes, become more efficient, agile and responsive, comply with governance and security standards and – at the same time - to provide a better experience to both clients and employees,” adds Vachiat.

Konica Minolta South Africa’s new offering can help organisations to streamline operations, integrating with line-of-business systems in finance, healthcare, admissions, accounts payable, contracts and government effectively.

For more information, please contact Mohammed Vachiat at mohammedVa@kmsa.com.