To ensure that access to document content remains solely in the hands of the designated recipients, the initial scan was of the unopened front of the sealed envelope. In practice this has allowed recipients to determine whether documents are innocuous enough to be opened, scanned and emailed to them or held, unopened, for them to claim in person more than 90% of the time. Or, as one person involved in the project put it, "figuring out that a bulging #10 envelope from the FBI is different than a solicitation for a 2.3% APR credit card isn’t a brain twister."
What wasn’t as easy was finding a high-speed scanner capable of performing mixed batch scanning of a vast array of envelope sizes, thicknesses and paper types without constant stalls, jams and "beeps" demanding human intervention. According to the business operations manager, "At first we tried using a few scanners that we already had in-house, but they weren’t fast enough and presented us with potential network problems down the line." Since this professional services company has a rigid policy prohibiting connection of USB devices to a PC, the only scanners considered as replacements were Ethernet-enabled units from Panasonic and three other major vendors.
According to Image Architects President Peter Nirenberg, a shootout between network scanners of the right capacity and speed from each vendor revealed the Panasonic KV-S1057C’s document feeder to be clearly superior at processing unopened envelopes of differing size, thickness and material. Equally important, the KV-S1057C proved to be the sole entrant in the "shootout" to be truly plug-and-play compatible with the professional services company’s Ethernet network. Using Panasonic scanners they would be able to upgrade or expand the system without the tweaks, software updates and/or driver upgrades required by traditional scanning software packages.
"Replacing the 65 page a minute KV-S1057C with one of our 200 page per minute scanners or adding a second scanner to the network would be a simple matter of removing and replacing just the scanner," Panasonic Partner Sales Manager Bill Kohler noted. "None of the other contenders offered that level of flexibility."
"Panasonic is a great fit," commented the business operations manager. "The KV-S1057 met all of our internal requirements, primarily the standards on how we secure devices to our network to help protect us from risk, loss of confidential information, etc. so we decided to go forward with it."