Royal Imaging
“Royal Imaging executives initiated the process of upgrading their document capture capabilities last year,” Ross Douglas, Panasonic Partner Sales Manager of Document Scanners recalls. “At the time they were using some competitive scanners and were able to provide demo units so they could run some side-by-side A-B tests, and for ‘shootouts’ between them. We also had Panasonic’s engineering team work with Royal’s testing team to make sure that the scanners were properly installed to directly interface with the software utilizing a TWAIN driver.”
After a significant and rigorous test period, the decision to replace the competitive scanners at all five service bureaus was made. A decision that Douglas, for one, attributes to Panasonic’s ongoing engineering support to Royal Imaging’s test teams, IT managers and scanner operators.
During those early days of the Panasonic transition, Ross Douglas was not the only person to notice the close and continuing collaboration between Panasonic technicians and their counterparts at Royal.
Challenges
Replace under-performing scanners at five high-volume service bureaus to eliminate machine downtime caused by failure to automatically correct double-feed errors and enable the Dokmee application to more rapidly perform OCR operations by increasing the speed and accuracy of character identification.
Solutions
Deployment of two Panasonic KV-S8147, 140ppm/280ipm, high-volume scanners to each of Royal Imaging’s five U.S.-based service bureaus.
Results
Significantly improved workflow. Extremely positive collective feedback from bureau managers and end users. Exceeded service expectations that have cemented Royal Imaging’s confidence in the decision to move to Panasonic.
“I commend you and Panasonic on the level of dedication and commitment you’ve both demonstrated so far in our new relationship,” Royal Imaging’s Director of Operations Miguel Oquendo wrote. “Having worked with one of your competitors for so long, I was worried that the transition would be difficult for our production managers and production shops because it’s been my experience that moving from one product/service to another can be disorienting – every piece of equipment does things slightly different.”
“With Panasonic the opposite has been true,” Oquendo continued. “As I’m sure you’re aware, recovering from mechanical issues, when they happen, is vital to the health of our company and productivity. The production managers at each of our service bureaus report a fast response for technical support over the phone and even speedier onsite visits when necessary.
“This is a welcome change from our old service provider as it was a common complaint from our production managers and scanning technicians that receiving support service was too slow and would require staying on hold for long periods of time and/or constant onsite visit rescheduling. The only advice I could offer them was to hound them with follow up calls,” comments Oquendo.
Oquendo noted that having to hound the scanner vendor is no longer an issue because of Panasonic’s prompt response to service and installation help requests including frequent updates on service progress and estimated completion times. According to Douglas, many retail or wholesale marketing companies like Michael Kors turn to Royal for their relatively low-volume scanning needs because they recognize there is no way to duplicate Royal’s quality and service standards in-house.
“Many of these retail companies are simply not set up to do these kinds of jobs themselves,” Douglas says. “They don’t have a document preparation staff. They don’t have the infrastructure essential for supporting a document management process. They could be processing anything from a bill of lading to an HR document, receipts, invoices, and a multitude of documents they can come across. But being that their focus is the retail space, they don’t necessarily have the time, equipment and people to support a document capture, optical character recognition, file and distribution effort.”
“It’s much easier for companies like that to fill up a few banker’s boxes full of such documents, transfer them to Royal via one of Royal’s fleet of insured employee-driven vans, have Royal scan them, and, where requested, OCR them and return the originals and either e-mail the scans back to the company or put them right on the company’s server,” Douglas added. “Clients are going to have different volumes and ID tags on each document, and different time frames when they need them. Some of the docs are going to be created for archival purposes only and others are going to be ‘live’ documents inputted into an accounts payable or other kind of document management process.”
“It’s hard to duplicate that kind of effort in house,” Douglas concluded. “An efficient, useful, easy retrieval, fully searchable digital document solution, whether for a Fortune 100 enterprise or a mid-sized business is light years away from simply buying a scanner, plugging it in and dumping a bunch of papers into the ADF. Many companies try that and when they see the first batch of scans on their computer screen everyone in the room looks at each other and says ‘now what?’ These jobs can cost-effectively be best handled by full-time document management experts at service bureaus like Royal.”
Royal also offers a full slate of services, from consulting and system design to document capture and processing software, to companies that do, despite all of the above decide to go it alone.
“Sharing information instantly, digitally and on multi-platforms is increasingly essential to business,” Royal tells potential clients committed to doing their own scanning. “Document scanning solutions resolve lost and misfiled documents, duplicate photocopies and wasted productivity.”
According to Douglas, Panasonic scanners like the KV-S8147, are an ideal hardware scanning solution for mass volume service bureaus like Royal Imaging where the combination of top-ranked hardware and software can transform the scanning process into an assembly line that can be tailored to specific needs and carefully managed to maximize efficiency and minimize costs. Royal ended their long-time relation with another first-tier scanner company and chose Panasonic to replace every scanner at all their locations.”
Royal employs an image capture, optical character recognition and distribution software, but it still can’t keep up with a 140 page per minute scanner. No software can and it’s very possible no software ever will. What Royal’s technical team discovered, however, was that documents scanned with the KV-S1847 were being processed significantly faster and creating far less of a backlog than documents scanned with the competitive equipment
