Bidvest group company, Minolta South Africa, is defining the new playing field for competing in the business technology arena, where knowledge and process are the most important elements of a business that is no longer about selling "speeds and feeds".
Minolta SA MD, Alan Griffith, says the company has established a model to exploit current business technology trends and growth potential in SA.
"Hardware is no longer a major point of differentiation in our business. Today it is all about adding value in the area of intangibles.
"Minolta SA has identified an assimilation gap, which is the disparity between rapid technological introduction and the market`s inability to absorb those changes at the same rate. It is in this arena that Minolta can offer services and technology to help our clients bridge that gap," says Griffith.
Business technology leaps over the past few years have seen a shift from the sale of standalone devices to a focus on multifunctional devices and their ability to be integrated with existing and new IT infrastructures. Thereafter, software bundling was introduced to add incremental value to companies` document solutions. Today, Griffith says, the focus is moving towards process and workflow, where product is secondary to services.
"This stage is all about value-add based on knowledge with the aim of making significant financial gains for our clients, and it`s a relatively uncontested arena at the moment. Our model puts intellectual capital, incorporating solution design and implementation, at the core of what we offer our clients," says Griffith.
This move elevates Minolta SA from merely competing in the low margin product and printing business to competing in the high margin "process" business, which includes everything that contributes to the lifecycle of a business document, from warehousing to archiving, administration, inventory obsolescence, distribution, among others.
Ten years ago Minolta SA established a software support division, which rapidly evolved into what is now called Minolta`s Integrated Systems Information Exchange (MiSix). Today MiSix has become the hub that drives Minolta SA`s success in the "process" environment.
MiSix is made up of specialist engineers - network specialists, application software specialists, colour specialists - who form teams to assess and address the wide range of client requirements relating to document solutions.
Minolta SA recently won a tender to handle the business technology solution for mining giant, Kumba Resources. Griffith says Minolta SA scored an 85% rating against 21 other competitors and across 25 key criteria. "Our nearest competitor scored 37% in the rating process. This result shows we have made significant strides in establishing ourselves as leaders in process and bridging the assimilation gap for our clients," he says.
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