Canon pushes toward paper-less society with DMS

“I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button,” he said. “I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy [printed paper] I’ll want in this world,” he said.

Fast forward to the 21st century and the reality is both accurate and a far cry from what is seen in the office today. In 2000, Mike Cohn wrote in the Enterprise Security Journal: “I read about how imaging was going to wipe out paper...But look around. Everywhere there’s paper — stacks and stacks of paper...There are mounds of memos. Piles of printouts. We are running out of places to put it!”

Over 20 years later, most office workers will not deny that their office still uses massive amounts of paper. But this creates waste and increases costs to a company. It is also a logistical nightmare to store, organise, and secure access to these materials. “You’ll be surprised even the biggest organisations have rooms and rooms of documents that they never touch, but also cannot throw,” says Vincent Low, senior director of Canon Singapore’s Business Imaging Solutions Division, in an interview with The Edge Singapore.

To manage the huge amount of data that companies have to process on a daily basis, they have turned to document management systems, or DMS. A DMS, Low explains, is “a central repository for all the company documents, that can be scanned, archived, indexed, and retrieved later”. This does not only apply to hardcopy documents that are scanned and digitised, but also for soft copy documents and logs.

What it allowed was for important information and documents to be accessed from anywhere, even at home, as seen when the Covid-19 pandemic hit many companies and forced workers to work from home.

The digitalisation drive led many companies to recognise the utility of so that their workers could access important information at home, and to allow business continuity even in this time.

Low says Canon is seeing a “huge increase in interest” in its DMS solutions, with enquiries jumping 3.5 times since the start of the “circuit breaker” in April 2020. Revenue from DMS sales for Canon Singapore also increased by 30% between January and September last year, compared to the same period in 2019. He added that the company also saw “double-digit” growth regionally, but declined to give specifics.

A DMS solution is not merely scanning documents into a digital soft copy so as to store them in a digital database. A DMS properly catalogues, indexes and controls access to the documents to the database. This saves time, effort and manpower. Furthermore, this also means that if done right, a file cannot be misplaced or lost.

Apart from the tangible cost savings for a company in terms of infrastructure and space, a DMS also helps to improve a company’s workflow, both in and out of the office, says Chia Wee Yaw, director of Singapore operations at Canon’s One Solution Division, at the same interview.

Chia paints this scenario: “If a PO (purchase order) comes in, somebody needs to approve it. I can’t access the office, I’m not digitised, what happens? I cannot do anything. So that affects the whole chain of events, I cannot collect my money. I cannot follow up with customers. That’s a problem.”

However, he also recognises that different companies have different needs. What Canon has done is to offer a DMS that can scale as a user company grows. “A company may use a DMS as a first step, and they come back to us one, two years later and say they have a new requirement. We are able to add on workflows, maybe create more categories, indexes to help them do it,” Chia adds.

Digital security

There are other ways a DMS can improve productivity. For example, users can act on certain documents, such as sending invoices to the approving authorities to sign electronically and return the documents — all without having to go through the laborious process of printing, signing the documents, and rescanning to email it back.

Now, with so many operations and processes occurring online, the digital security of these documents are a valid concern for companies. Chia says Canon protects the documents using so-called RSA 256-bit encryption keys, which is one of most frequently used encryption standards, and to his knowledge, it is difficult to breach a document and say, forge a signature without the decryption key.

Furthermore, Canon’s DMS keeps a very clear audit trail. “This means we know who accesses it. Who checks in, who checks out this document? At what time? Or using whose login credentials? This is how we actually maintain the authenticity of the document, and maintain the security of access control,” he adds.

Canon’s DMS can also come with customised integration with some of the other common software suites used by many users, such as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. By doing so, workflows can integrate even more. For some companies, this is so important it can hinge on whether they are open for business during the pandemic.

In one user example, Chia says one of Canon’s clients in the F&B industry used their solutions to manage their temperature taking as well as entry and exit records, something that Singapore has mandated as a condition for businesses to open. This, he adds, proves that DMS is not limited to simply paper documents in hard and soft copy.

The end of printers?

With such a long list of benefits, what is stopping more companies from adopting a DMS? Why are offices still needing rooms of filing cabinets and stacks of files? Low boils it down to a simple reason: The fear of change. “All of us are human, and when we feel change, sometimes the changes indirectly tell the end-users that maybe their job is becoming less and less useful.”

Chia also believes that companies may not have a choice any more. “Digitalisation efforts were a good-to-have [before the pandemic], but I think these days we all have to agree that the businesses are taking a close hard look at it because their survival sometimes depends on it,” he says.

With the rise of DMS, does this spell the beginning of the end for Canon’s copier and printer business? Low thinks not. He says the printer and copier business are still “a key business” to Canon. Despite a fall over the last couple of years, printing volume has held steady and he attributes this to the explosion of content on the internet. “Last time, you and I only printed Excel spreadsheets. Now, we print many other things. So this has helped to mitigate the fall,” adds Low.

Unlike Pake back in 1975, Low does not think that paper is going away. That is also why Canon still considers its print business a “core business”. “Some of us choose to read standard hardcopy. Having a cosy hardcopy book, that experience cannot disappear.”

However, he does acknowledge that print volumes have been “stagnant” and may fall, and Canon hopes to win over more DMS customers that can on one hand, complement the print business, while also offsetting the drop in print volume. “In fact, down the line, if you’re in control of the digital copy of the customer’s environment. Maybe the customer can never leave you,” he says.

Chia concludes: “We have to be aware of the fact that print probably is stagnant. I think this is a pretty good time to position ourselves as an end-to-end solutions provider in the document lifecycle.”