#morethanprint: 3 Ways an Intelligent Device Takes You Beyond Print

Intelligent devices take businesses beyond print. Featuring advanced integrations, smart automation, and enhanced scanning capabilities, they address core business needs around data and document capture, storage, and sharing.

With an intelligent device, you can:

Summary

Find out how today’s intelligent devices do more than print

Time: 5 minute read

Drive process innovation to empower employees
Improve responsiveness to enhance the customer experience
Connect business needs to automation for increased efficiency and decreased costs
Boost user adoption of new technology
Secured your data and meet regulatory compliance
Create paperless workflows
And so much more…

Yet, all of the benefits of an intelligent device come from three primary drivers: automation, security, and collaboration.

In this article, we’ll look at each one and how they help to streamline your efforts and promote greater business agility. Before we do, let’s answer the first question you might be asking…

What is an “intelligent device”?

An intelligent device drives business intelligence. According to Forrester Research, business intelligence is:

“a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information. It allows business users to make informed business decisions with real-time data that can put a company ahead of its competitors.”

At first, business intelligence focused on reporting and analytics. As technology has evolved, new opportunities have also developed. Faster, more efficient data capture means a more agile business. Mobile and remote workforces mean a wider range of talent available and new possibilities to build customer relationships, support, and sell.

Together, data capture plus workforce mobility represent two trends that can give businesses a significant competitive edge through real-time information, increased productivity, and better overall customer experiences.

Intelligent devices, then, drive business intelligence by empowering speed and agility. They act as digital on-ramps for data and document distribution, storage, protection, and access. Printing and document finishing become simpler through custom configurations and intuitive interfaces. Plus, these devices promote financial and eco-friendly practices by reducing waste.

Let’s take a closer look at the three primary drivers that make these devices intelligent.

Make smart, lean choices

Speed, efficiency & cost-effectiveness in print infrastructure

Workflow Automation

Manual tasks take time. They introduce the chance of error. Data moves slower.

Through automation, intelligent devices resolve each one. Automated processes reduce manual work to speed workflows. Advanced technologies capture data, prevent document loss, and introduce redundancies that reduce the risk of data error. Faster processes make data available faster.

More specifically, intelligent devices can:

DRIVE PRODUCTIVITY. Pre-configured short-cut buttons send documents where they need to go, with the press of a button.
CONVERT PAPER INTO USABLE, DIGITAL DATA. Advanced capture software takes your paper document and creates an editable, searchable PDF, Word, or Excel file to keep you and your team focused on productive work rather than manual data conversion.
ROUTE DOCUMENTS TO 3RD PARTY APPS. Send documents to cloud applications like Google Drive™, OneDrive®, Dropbox™, Box™, or a document management system like DocuWare Cloud.
INTELLIGENTLY FILE. Build enhanced workflows to route documents based on file type for efficient filing or distribution to keep everyone informed and your documents secured and accessible.
AUTOMATE FILE FOLDER CREATION. Streamline your efforts by eliminating time-consuming tasks like folder creation, document naming, and metadata tagging with automated steps at the point-of-scan.
INTEGRATE SEAMLESSLY. Intelligent devices feature advanced integration so you can move today’s paper workflows to digital with less effort. For example, HR documents can be digitally stored in a protected, searchable repository making it easier to track applications, hiring documents, performance reviews and more. Or, automate invoice processing with integrated tools that extract data, send documents for approval, and post completed documents to your ERP.
CREATE CUSTOM WORKFLOWS. Connect your paper and digital processes as you build workflows that capture, centralize, and process data to meet your unique business needs as unstructured content becomes easier to find, manage, and share.

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Simple, yet Secured, Access

Data and documents trapped in siloes obstruct productivity. Extra time must be spent finding, analyzing, and sharing documents between individuals and teams. Print output can become a real challenge for mobile and remote workers to share and distribute content. Individual offices become information siloes limiting employees from other areas access to local productivity tools.

Intelligent devices help break down all of these process gaps by making it easier to share documents, control access and move them into digital workflows, or simply just print. Advanced, but simple to manage security, gives your intelligent device capabilities like:

MOBILE PRINTING. Cloud-print platforms and mobile print functionality enable employees and guests to use local printers without connecting to the network. Intelligent devices support almost any mobile device or workstation, unlike some mobile print solutions that only support a single platform or application.
SECURED PRINT RELEASE. Both employees and guests can send print jobs that will only print after authentication or keying in a release code. You make sharing easy while keeping everyone’s information secured.
DOCUMENT ACCESS RIGHTS. Pass-through authentication keeps your electronic content management systems secured while simplifying access for those users who need access. Local or in the cloud, only authorized users can access – or even see – content repositories for sending or retrieving of documents.

Advanced Collaboration and Sharing

The value of automation and security comes from their ability to enhance your ability to protect, manage, and connect your people. Sharing data, content, and ideas drive innovation, customer service, and sales.

While intelligent devices have amazing automation and security features, their real benefit comes in the way they bring people and information together. Some ways they can do this include:

THE CONNECTED CLOUD. Your teams will find it easier to collaborate when you bring paper and digital together in your cloud apps such as OneDrive®, Dropbox™, SharePoint™, or even a local network folder.
DATA CAPTURE. Key data collected and recorded from your documents via optical character recognition (OCR) makes data available to everyone on your team faster, informing decision-making, inspiring ideas, and accelerating processes.
AUTOMATED ROUTING. By eliminating extra manual steps required to move paper, your people have more time to spend on their core focus – creating and delivering the absolute best customer experience possible.

Are you ready to take your devices beyond print?

Many multifunctional printers have moved far beyond print. Today, they offer automation and security that can empower your employees to share and collaborate more effectively. Their ability to break down siloes and make data and information available positions them as integral business intelligence tools.

To learn more about how our intelligent devices do #morethanprint and can help your business, please explore our features solutions.