Omane Sokapase, Hardware Product Manager at Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa.
As South African organisations move through the first quarter, two priorities dominate executive agendas: controlling costs and demonstrating meaningful progress on sustainability. Increasingly, these objectives are no longer viewed as competing pressures, but as interconnected outcomes driven by smarter technology choices.
Rising operational costs, tighter budgets and growing expectations around environmental responsibility are forcing businesses to look beyond short-term fixes. In many cases, inefficiency, waste and unnecessary carbon impact stem from the same root causes: short-life technology, paper-heavy processes and reactive infrastructure management.
“Cost and sustainability challenges are often symptoms of the same problem,” says Omane Sokapase, Hardware Product Manager at Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa. “When technology is designed for short replacement cycles and workflows rely on manual intervention, organisations pay the price financially and environmentally.”
Print and document infrastructure is a common blind spot. Frequent device replacement, high consumable usage and inefficient workflows contribute to unnecessary spend and avoidable waste. These costs accumulate gradually, making them difficult to spot without deliberate review.
Kyocera’s long-life technology philosophy addresses this challenge at a structural level. ECOSYS devices are engineered with durable components that significantly reduce replacement cycles and consumable waste, while delivering consistent performance over extended lifespans. This design approach lowers total cost of ownership while reducing environmental impact, allowing sustainability and cost control to reinforce each other.
Beyond hardware, workflow automation plays a critical role in reducing waste. Manual processes often lead to reprints, duplicated documents and delays that increase resource consumption. By digitising documents at the point of capture and automating routing and approvals, organisations can reduce paper dependency and improve operational efficiency simultaneously.
Square 9 Softworks, Kyocera’s intelligent document management and workflow automation platform, enables this shift by turning unstructured documents into structured, searchable information that moves seamlessly through digital workflows. Combined with Kyocera’s intelligent capture devices, businesses gain visibility, accountability and control across the document life cycle.
As sustainability reporting and budget accountability intensify in Q1, organisations are under pressure to demonstrate tangible action rather than intent. Long-life technology and workflow automation offer practical, measurable ways to reduce cost, risk and environmental impact without compromising performance.
Kyocera advises organisations to view the first quarter as a strategic reset point. A sustainability and total cost of ownership review can help identify where long-life devices and smarter workflows can deliver immediate efficiencies and long-term resilience, aligning financial discipline with responsible operations.
