Imaging Industry Witnesses a Massive Transformation, its Imperative to Evolve as per Customer Needs

The state of the imaging industry has been evolving rapidly. In a recent interaction with Emmanuel Das, Editor, Silicon India, K. Bhaskhar, Senior Vice President - Business Imaging Solutions, Canon India, explained how technology has created a hypergolic shift in the imaging industry, and what it offers to the customers through advanced solutions from companies like Canon India.

Share your viewpoints on the current imaging industry? 

The imaging industry is going through a massive transformation in terms of needs and wants of customers. The current requirement is more dynamic, and it is going through a metamorphosis. Today, the machines and technologies are evolving to perform multiple functions and not just being limited to copy, print or faxing.They are becoming more intelligent. From a larger perspective, the imaging industry is growing at an exponential rate and those players who continue to bring in advanced technologies and user friendliness with their offerings will be able to sustain and hold a leadership position.

What are the different business product solutions that you are offering in the imaging industry?

Today, there are advanced multi-functional devices (MFDs) available in the market that come with in built solutions and can help industries with all their key tasks. At Canon, we offer a range of MFDs from our image RUNNER series which are supported by neat applets that can store a plethora of applications within. For instance, our MFDs come with a single touch ‘connector’ button, through which, a document can easily be pushed into the central repository database after scanning. We also provide superior cloud-based offerings bundled with our solutions - an input software called ‘Therefore’ and an output software called ‘Uniflow’. ‘Therefore Online’ supports printing, archiving, indexing, and creating a workflow for the document, all together. On the other hand, Uniflow supports ‘anywhere print’ options by eliminating the need of multiple printers within an organisation thereby providing cost optimisation & saving electricity.

Brief us about the Maintenance service and environmental impact of Canon’s offerings?

Canon’s advanced range of business solutions are equipped with the latest technology and offer machine uptime of about 97-98%. Canon provides proactive maintenance services to ensure that the machine is monitored in such a way that even before the customer realises a fault with the machine, the service maintenance cycle has already been kick-started in the backend. Our customer support network is supremely efficient, as after routine intervals, the customer gets a service call for the printer which ensures paramount customer satisfaction.

As for the environmental impact, Canon machines have a low carbon footprint and come with On-Demand Fixing Technology that regulates power consumption, allowing businesses to save more. Not only that, since so many papers are used in the process of printing, it is only apt that they should be replenished. To give back to the environment, we launched the Green Environment Together (GET) initiative in 2019, wherein we plant a sapling for every copier sold to our direct customers.

How is the imaging industry contributing to different sectors of the economy?

For the printing and imaging industry, there has been immense penetration and adoption of advanced document management and imaging solutions, especially in the last few years. From a small scale to larger corporates and enterprises, everyone is aspiring for MFDs.

Starting from a household to a slightly larger scale like SMBs, coffee shops or even start-ups, there are innumerable printing requirements ranging from photocopying assignments, scanning bills, to printing visiting cards. The impact of this industry can be felt across large-scale sectors too like automobile, healthcare, SMEs, and BFSI, as they are all availing exuberant support from the technologically advanced imaging products. These solutions have made lives much easier and offloaded employees from everyday manual tasks by catering to a plethora of functions across sectors like e-record maintenance, easy insurance claims, big data analytics, inventory management, document management, amongst others.Therefore, digitization of data plays a vital role and when implemented on a large scale, it brings much needed effectiveness in every sector.

Please throw light on the importance of document management systems (DMS)in the imaging industry.

Today, almost every large-scale or small size corporate has ERPs and access to document management solutions but not all of them use it effectively. Industries today need to start investing and relying on document capturing technology to help make businesses simple, and Canon is well placed to suit these needs.Our software solutions like Therefore Online and IRISXtract help scan, archive, index, and seamlessly merge with the company's DMS solutions. DMS serves as the starting point and a key element for any organization to plan next steps – monitoring data from different departments and taking a call on cutting down costs, expanding business and more. As far as security is concerned, every organisation takes their own set of measures to ensure that there are no data breaches and malware attacks which is why necessary protocols are implemented.

What are some of the recent innovations that we have seen from Canon?

Owing to the fast pace of advancements in this industry, we constantly keep innovating while keeping the convenience of customers as our primary agenda. We keep upgrading the sensors in our machines to feature smarter auto-detections, infusing newer software, amongst others. Not only that, today, everything can be connected through the cloud which helps in monitoring the data. This helps us improve our after-sales support by equipping our machines with intuitive capabilities to send repair reports to the maintenance teams. In our own ways, we are slowly and steadily eradicating redundancies to simplify business needs. This is in line with our vision of ‘Business can be Simple’ - you take care of your business, leave the rest to us. Canon aims to be a one-stop solution for all document management and imaging needs.

We are also continuously improving our technology to bring more ease to the users. Canon is committed to evolve as per customer needs and invests 10% of the profits on R&D. We have patented advanced technologies like rapid fusing technology as well as accelerated paper feed mechanism which avoids paper jams. In fact, we have been ranked in the Top 3 for the last 13 years in the highest number of patent technologies registered.

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