The benefits of modern day Copiers & MFP’s when leasing or purchasing offer the ability to scan directly from your device to anywhere in your working environment. This data can be manipulated into any format you wish- scan to email, scan to searchable PDF, scan to folder, scan to desktop or FTP. The new phrase that seems to be sticking in our society is calling this “documents management” and now with the roll out of Apps that run on copiers, you can easily scan directly to the following cloud storage services:
• Box
• Concur
• Evernote®
• Egnyte
• SharePoint
• SharePoint Online
• Google DriveTM
• DropBox
• YouSendIt
• NetDocuments
• Salesforce
• NetSuite
• DocumentMall
All of this can be done seamlessly, with access to these made just as easy with mobile device access. But, on the local level within your office environment can be a bit different. You may face significant challenges to existing infrastructure on several levels. This can be identifying information sources, compatibility with existing CRM’s & ERP’s, storage, archiving, indexing properties, meta data entries (that are accurate), ensuring the proper workflow processes and more. The entire process can challenge even the most organized of managers. The cost to businesses is a huge amount of work hours dedicated to ensuring all of the data is organized, secured and efforts aren’t being duplicated across divisions.
The Impact of Big Data on the Organization
On the front-end, or the forward facing portion of your company that interfaces with customers, the wealth of knowledge that you can gain from big data can inform decision-making processes in your company. This includes background on how and when your products are being used, the specific geographies or demographics in which you can find your customers, and how your customer service is solving issues and generating new revenue.
On the back-end, or the logistical side of things, the trends that you can mine from your own historical data can help determine how much inventory to keep on hand or which supply centers are most efficient. These insights can help you harness cost overruns or find cheaper alternatives to moving product from A to B.
But just having more data isn’t a solution in itself. You need to have more intelligent data and processes as well. Whether it’s looking at outsourcing your big data or business process needs to specialized organizations, or simply getting some help on retaining digital records so everything is easily searchable, you will have to engineer new workflow processes to manage the influx of data.
The next task will be to build or implement a system that can retrieve the indexed data and make sense of the trends that will emerge. After these workflow processes have been implemented to actually harness the data, only then will you be able to use this data to justify your decisions and take full advantage of what big data can bring to your business.