We recently entered into a partnership with WJR in the Metro Detroit area.  Listen for our ads!  If you want to hear directly from a few customers you can also hear the ads here.

Managed print is a great way to control costs and improve print efficiency throughout the office.  However, if you want to see big changes in output costs you have to change the culture and the behaviors in the work place.  It’s great to limit the costs, but if the people still click print the desired outcome may not be reached.  If your desire is to change the way people think about printing, you may want to look at rules based printing.  Just think of all the paper that sits on the printer that never gets retrieved… what if it was never printed at all.  Or how about the blue hyperlink of an email… does that really need to be printed in color.  Now we are talking about some real savings!

We realize that many Michigan businesses have taken big hits over the past few years.  However, some industries have seen modest job growth.  Others have seen big growth.  Here is something to consider.  It is easy to put lean office or document management projects on the back burner because we are too busy implementing other projects or dealing with everyday “stuff”.  One thing that is true in this economy is that companies have cut waste and jobs, so everyone is doing more.  So is now a good time or a bad one to look at getting lean.  Here is the one question to consider: If the process is broken or in disarray now, how much harder will it be to fix when you grow 10%?  How about 25%?

If you did not have a chance to check out the Applied Imaging news page for the official press release click here.  We have officially expanded to the Detroit metro area.  Our Novi office is open and the merger with American Imaging is complete.  We are excited to have everyone aboard and we look forward to supporting the American Imaging clients with the same great customer service. 

A new case study was added to the website that gives an in depth look at DocSmart, our document management program.  The case study specifically addresses a customer that was looking to be more efficient as it relates to document archiving, and retrieval.  Click here to read the case study.  To go to the case study page click here. 

We recently took delivery of our new Océ VarioPrint 6320 and we are very excited about the opportunity to bring it to the Michigan marketplace.  The Océ VarioPrint 6000 Ultra, the world’s fastest and most productive family of digital perfecting printing systems, now uses its Océ Gemini Technology to provide cost-effective solutions to meet the highest demands of any production environment.

Here is a link to our product catalog if you want to find out more, but pictures don't do it any justice.  You have to come out and see it!

The VP of Strategic Marketing from Ricoh, Mark Boelhouwer, came out Grand Rapids to talk with us earlier this week.  In addition to learning that the Netherlands has 2.7 bikes per person, we learned much about the changing managed print and managed document services landscape.

Here is an interesting statistic.  “For every dollar spent on printing, organizations will need another nine dollars to manage the documents printed” (Source: All Associates Group).  It’s the iceberg concept.  The market is shifting (being pulled by customers) to focus more on the traditionally unobserved costs associated with document output.

Here is another interesting thought.  By 2020 IDC projects the digital universe will be 44 times the size of 2009.  In 2010 alone it grew 50%.  However, the economy has made it tough for many companies to account for this.  All organizations will have to continue to get more efficient to be able to compete.  We will all have to create smarter, leaner offices!

If $1.00 of soft cost savings does not equal $1.00 in hard cost savings this is for you.  It is a common thought that efficiency in electronic document management only leads to soft dollar savings.  Here are a few questions you may want to ask of your organization that may directly impact your bottom line.  Are you printing and sending out invoices?  How much is the postage?  Are there copies of the same document in multiple locations?  Have you ever needed proof for a law suit that you were not able to provide?  What did it cost you?  Have you ever needed Proof of Delivery or a Bill of Lading that was disputed and could not find it?  For all the CFO’s out there, how is your DSO?  How would it impact your organization if it could be reduced by 5 days?  Have you ever missed a discount for early payment?

These are all great questions to keep in mind when looking at an electronic document management system.

There were a few side notes that I wanted to make about this process.  Culture plays a big role when looking at trying to become lean and more paperless.  People are comfortable doing things the way that they have been doing them.  Electronic document management is different than being able to touch and feel hard copy documents.  There are fears.  Job security can be a huge road block.  Another big one related to that is an embarrassment factor.  “Why didn’t I think of that?”  These have to be taken into account when changing how we do what we do.

The other note is to make sure that we have the process as it is now – “Current is key” – and shown as the full process on paper.  It’s easy to look at small parts of a process and try to fix each small piece.  But that may not fix the whole process and may end up breaking something else in the process.  As Randy mentioned in our meeting today, attacking small pieces of a process is counterproductive.  It leads to “Rabbit Holes”.  By starting with the whole process mapped we can get to the true sources of the pain.  After we have that tied down, we can condense and get lean!