(Editor’s note: This column from Art Post originally appeared in The Week in Imaging on March 2, 2012. Was he right about managed documents?)
We’ve all read the hype about managed print services. Some of us have embraced it and some of us have tried it and stated it’s not for us. But did we ever think about managing the scanned documents?
I sell “down the street”; hardware has always been my bread and butter. After 32 years in the business I can see the trend to scan more, e-mail more and a distinct line has been drawn in the sand for companies to not print and copy as much. The documents are still there, they’re just being scanned, shared and e-mailed more and more.
So, with more SaaS Cloud Document Management Systems on the horizon, the increasing popularity of Microsoft 365 why can’t we (dealers) have a plan for SMB’s to manage the scanned documents?
I hear excuses from potential customers like “We’d like to do this, however we don’t have the IT expertise to do this”, “We can’t hire another person right now for this,” “We’re kind of illiterate when it comes to operating new software applications”, “We can’t afford the training right now”, “We don’t have the budget right now.”
Everyone likes idea of being able to find documents when they need them along with the idea of being able to access documents when they are out of the office.
So, why can’t we offer a managed document approach to the scanned documents? I’m thinking we can do this easily and offer IT block time agreements, a monthly billing charge or maybe a document charge. We could meet with clients and develop their index and naming process. The customer would then scan all of the documents to a folder on the server, once a week we could log in, index and upload those documents to the SaaS program.
We would only have to train the user in finding the documents, or we could even manage this part of the business. Just think of it, no IT resources would be needed for the customer, no additional hardware, and no learning curve on how to use the software. We can manage and do it for them similar to a managed print program, only we would control the documents.
We can bill professional services monthly or even bill by the document. This would alleviate the large investment, along with removing the fear of buying a product and never using it. As Ken Stewart of Photizo Group stated “make us stickier in the account and it’s a true win-win and the beauty of this is that it can start with relatively little capital expenditure, and there are some great SaaS-based partners to help with this.”
As far as I’m concerned if companies are willing to let us manage their prints, then why wouldn’t they let us manage their scanned documents and workflow I’m sure, someone, somewhere is doing this. I think it’s about time we offered this to our SMB accounts. Thoughts, ideas?
Good selling!
