Jonathan Osbourne, Altron Document Solutions, head of sales.

Offices are unlikely to go paperless in the foreseeable future, but it is important to aim for ‘print less’ offices for sustainability and to slash costs.

This is according to Jonathan Osbourne, Altron Document Solutions head of sales, who says large enterprises still field fleets of thousands of printers, running up bills of millions of rands on printing.

Organisations with little to no control over their print environments could have employees printing entire cookbooks, school projects or running their own private print businesses using corporate printers, resulting in up to 60% of print in those environments being unnecessary, he says.

“Next-generation managed services have helped eliminate abuse, but a great deal of unnecessary printing still happens,” Osbourne says. “Many employees still print every e-mail, invoice or document for approvals or signing off, when these workflows could be digitised. Many organisations still have simultaneous digital and paper-driven processes.”

Osbourne says unnecessary printing slows processes and adds significant costs to operations. “When organisations look at the TCO of print, they seldom consider the impact of lost efficiency, and the costs of paper and filing services.

“We are helping organisations to move to a print less future, not a printless future, through an analytical layer that looks at the processes behind the use of the printer, and digitising them. We are looking at XaaS or consumption-based modelling, making it easier for organisations to process the documents, making workflows more efficient and still saving the customer money. So we as Altron Document Solutions are transforming document management and workflows with Xerox Intelligent Workplace Services. It’s good for customers and good for the environment,” he says.

Xerox Intelligent Workplace Services solutions work hand-in-hand with Xerox machines, seamlessly integrated to automate processes, help lower costs, enhance team collaboration, make data more accessible for faster decision-making, and reduce errors and improve compliance.

Xerox ConnectKey apps offer an array of apps to simplify and automate tasks to save time and money. With apps for sectors ranging from education and healthcare to legal and business, ConnectKey apps reduce process duplication and simplify workflows. For example, Connect for Salesforce instantly digitises and organises client documents, and searches documents within a Salesforce account for printing. Connect for Sage Accounting speeds up payment processing with fewer errors, making processing and payment as simple as scan, review and submit.

Xerox DocuShare is an intuitive, cloud-enabled enterprise content management platform to manage a wide range of paper-based and digital content, and automate business processes. The Xerox DocuShare Lifecycle Manager automates the scheduled review, update and disposition of documents to support audits and compliance. The Xerox DocuShare Optical Character Recognition (OCR) add-on enables organisations to scan to create searchable PDF files, Microsoft Office documents or simple text files. The files are then fully indexed and can be accessed using the search function.

Xerox Intelligent Workplace Services uses comprehensive security, analytics, digitisation and cloud technologies and software to deliver a more seamless work experience across paper and digital platforms.

Altron Document Solutions is the world’s largest Xerox distributor and Africa’s leading technology and services company. It markets and services the complete range of Xerox document equipment, software solutions and services to 26 Sub-Saharan Africa countries. Altron Document Solutions forms part of the JSE-listed Altron group.