Canon U.S.A. Introduces New imageFORMULA DR-2020U Universal Scanner For Business Environments Of All Sizes

(Lake Success, NY) - Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leading provider of advanced digital imaging and software solutions, today unveiled its new digital scanning solution for workgroup document imaging and general office applications – the new imageFORMULA DR-2020U – the latest model in the Company's award-winning DR-Scanner line.
The DR-2020U incorporates the reliable paper handling and high-quality imaging capabilities inherent in Canon's DR-Scanner line to provide robust functionality at an affordable price. Ideal for distributed scanning and general office workloads, the DR-2020U offers versatile three-way scanning – a 50-page Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) for batch scanning, a flatbed to accommodate unconventional-sized documents, and a dedicated business card feeder tray to handle batch business card scanning. The DR-2020U is capable of one-pass duplex scanning at up to 20 pages / 40 images per minute (ppm/imp) in black-and-white and up to 20 ppm/imp in color*. Combined with its user-friendly design and extensive bundled software, the DR-2020U is indispensable to nearly any office environment.
"Canon has a long-standing commitment to answering the digital imaging needs of all segments of the market. With the introduction of the DR-2020U, we are expanding upon our already robust array of digital imaging technologies," said Jim Rosetta, vice president and general manager, Imaging Systems Group, Canon U.S.A. "With its user-friendly design, outstanding workflow and increased imaging flexibility, the DR-2020U is a cost-effective addition to help boost office efficiency and productivity."
The DR-2020U features an intuitively designed, copier-like control panel allowing users to quickly navigate through job functions resulting in increased workflow efficiency. Users can easily begin scanning operations through three pre-defined Scan-To-Job buttons for Copy, File and E-mail functions, as well as five programmable Scan-To-Job buttons for assigning up to 50 different imaging tasks. The Scan-To-Job buttons enable multiple users within a workgroup to access frequently performed tasks at the touch of a button, providing for simpler use and greater office efficiency.
Further enhancing user productivity, the DR-2020U includes ISIS/TWAIN drivers, industry standard interfaces which seamlessly link applications and scanners for easy hardware integration with third-party Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software. The new scanner is also bundled with the latest document imaging software packages – including Canon CapturePerfect and CaptureOnTouch, Adobe Acrobat Standard, NewSoft Presto! BizCard, and Nuance PaperPort Standard and OmniPage SE – to deliver a complete end-to-end solution.
Recognizing the need to capture original documents with precision, the Canon DR-2020U features a 1200 dots-per-inch (dpi) optical resolution, and includes a multitude of advanced image processing capabilities such as Advanced Text Enhancement, Color Dropout, Deskew and Border Removal to help optimize electronic document creation.
In addition, the DR-2020U employs efficiency-boosting features such as Double Feed Detection, Auto Page Size Detection, and Skip Blank Page to reduce tedious preparation and presorting of documents prior to scanning, helping to streamline workflows.
To ease integration with customer infrastructures, the DR-2020U universal workgroup scanner has been tested and is compatible with solutions from the following software vendors**:

• Accusoft Pegasus
• Computhink, Inc.
• Datacap, Inc.
• Digitech Systems, Inc.
• DocuLex, Inc.
• Therefore Corporation

The new imageFORMULA DR-2020U universal scanner, which meets ENERGY STAR Program guidelines for energy efficiency and complies with the RoHS and WEEE directives for reduction of hazardous substances and waste products, is available immediately through Davis Business Machines and other authorized Canon resellers for a manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) of $695.
About Canon U.S.A., Inc.
Canon U.S.A., Inc. is a leading provider of consumer, business-to-business, and industrial digital imaging solutions. Its parent company, Canon Inc. (NYSE:CAJ), a top patent holder of technology, ranked third overall in the U.S. in 2008†, with global revenues of US $45 billion, is listed as number four in the computer industry on Fortune Magazine's World's Most Admired Companies 2009 list, and is on the 2009 BusinessWeek list of "100 Best Global Brands." Canon is committed to the highest levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, providing 100 percent U.S.-based consumer service and support for all products. At Canon, we care because caring is essential to living together in harmony. Founded upon a corporate philosophy of Kyosei – "all people, regardless of race, religion or culture, harmoniously living and working together into the future" – Canon U.S.A. supports a number of social, youth, educational and other programs, including environmental and recycling initiatives. Additional information about these programs can be found at www.usa.canon.com/kyosei. To keep apprised of the latest news from Canon U.S.A., sign up for the Company's RSS news feed by visiting www.usa.canon.com/rss.
About Davis Business Machines, Inc.
Davis Business Machines, Inc. (www.dbm.net) has been an innovative leader in providing strategic business solutions and services to organizations since 1963. Davis integrates and applies industry-leading expertise and innovative technology to help companies meet today's complex information lifecycle management demands and prepare them for tomorrow's challenges. Their mission is to provide total customer satisfaction by helping customers efficiently manage the document lifecycle through superior products, solutions and services. Today, Davis is among the most successful business solutions providers in the Lehigh Valley, with a satellite office in Pottstown, PA to better serve their Montgomery and Bucks County customers. Follow news, photos and video coming from Davis Business Machines by subscribing to our news feed by visiting http://www.dbm.net/articles?rss or on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/dbmnet.
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† Based on weekly patent counts issued by United States Patent and Trademark Office
All referenced product names, and other marks, are trademarks of their respective owners.
* Examples based on typical settings, rated in pages/images per minute with letter-sized documents at 200dpi, portrait-feeding direction via ADF. Actual processing speeds may vary based on PC performance and application.
** Please check www.usa.canon.com regularly for updates on software vendors who have tested the imageFORMULA DR-2020U universal workgroup scanner.

The New Document Management and The Help Desk

November 2009 Edition of the Canon "Highlights" Newsletter

The November 2009 edition of the "Highlights" newsletter includes the following topics:

• Message
• You Can Call Me Al … Bringing Attention to the Environment
• IFS Sets Green Goals
• Environment
• Commitment to Environmental Responsibility
• Environmentally Conscious Products with the Next Generation In Mind
• Canon Forest Program for Factory Certified Models
• Environmentally Conscious Design of the New imagePROGRAF iPF755/750 and iPF655/650
• New Product Information
• COPYblue
• uniFLOW Output Manager (OM) v4.0.5
• Agfa :Apogee Prepress Integration
• Did You Know?
• Let Your Business RUN Microsite Update
• Events
• Canon Sponsored InfoTrends Webinar
• 2010 PODI AppForum Conference
• RSNA
• Look What’s coming – DICOM Launch
• Inside Canon U.S.A., Inc.
• Interview with Jennifer Kolchinsky, Sr. Specialist, Services Business Planning

The newsletter may be found by clicking here.

Countering The Content Conundrum

Have you ever spent hours poring over a document to ensure accuracy and inclusion of all edits made to earlier versions? Have you — or has your company — ever suffered consequences from taking content written for an internal audience and using it for sales or marketing — without thoroughly vetting it for external use?

No matter the department — HR, sales, marketing, legal, administration, etc. — many of you find that kind of content pain to be an unavoidable fact of work life, standard operating procedure. Unaware of a better way to create and manage content, you suck it up. Well, you can stop sucking because there is a better way, and that way is structured content — documents that have been chunked into meaningful component parts and tagged in a systematic fashion.

While it remains one of the best-kept enterprise secrets, structured content has long proven its value in technical communications where it mitigates risks, reduces costs, and increases revenues. Better still, the road to mature, standards-based structured content has been paved by organizations such as IBM and OASIS and standards such as DITA. Now, it’s time for other enterprise functions to realize the same benefits associated with structured content.

In brief, structured content brings organization and automation to content. Structured content lets content creators efficiently create, collaborate, manage and reuse high volumes of information, which can be repurposed into the languages and formats your customers demand. The result? Organizations accelerate the cost-effective delivery of accurate information products — whether those products are for internal or external consumption, e.g., sales RFPs, marketing brochures, HR forms, legal contracts or any other department’s content.

So, what does structured content look like in the enterprise? It depends where you look.

In research & development, you can use structured content to create and manage engineering documents, technical publications, and strategy and planning documents. Here, structured content can help increase revenues by improving the ability of key employees, partners and vendors to share and discover documents, resulting in faster time to market for new products. Meanwhile, costs can be reduced through content repurposing and reuse, which eliminates the duplication and re-creation of existing content. And structured content can mitigate R&D risk, for instance, helping companies avoid noncompliance, and improve customer satisfaction by ensuring the consistent use of authoritative content in product documentation.

In manufacturing, contracts, manufacturing operations, standard operating procedures and regulated documents all benefit from structured content. Revenue growth can come from streamlined creation of contracts and agreements, ultimately accelerating time to revenue. Cost reductions may be seen in reduced rework, recall and aftermarket service costs otherwise caused by inaccurate information in manufacturing documents. Risk can be mitigated by reducing the risk of inaccurate or inconsistent contracts, and by reducing the risk of human error associated with reviewing one-of-a-kind, complex legal documents.

In sales and marketing, structured content can be applied to sales and marketing collateral as well as contact center documents. The revenue opportunities in the sales and marketing department include developing a reusable library of proven RFPs and content to improve win rates. That reusable library also helps to reduce the costs of goods sold by reducing the time and costs associated with developing proposals and business correspondence. Predefined, reusable content components with approved language and standard terms and conditions mitigate risks by ensuring the accuracy of contracts and legally binding agreements.

In service and support, you can use structured content for maintenance and repair, technical support and training documents. To increase revenues, you could increase aftermarket sales through maintenance and repair operations supported with structured content. Cost reductions may be realized through content reuse, which reduces editorial and publishing costs. Structured content helps mitigate the risk of noncompliance and potentially catastrophic equipment failure by ensuring personnel have consistent, up-to-date maintenance and repair information.

In corporate administration, structured content can benefit legal and regulatory, human resources, and finance and operations documents. Revenue growth can come from improving the ability to discover patents and IP documentation for ongoing growth and protection of revenue streams. Cost savings may be realized by reducing redundant editorial and publishing costs, which lowers the cost of publishing and maintaining standard documents. Finally, structured content can help reduce the risks of errors during the review process and through regulatory filings, demonstrating that you have compliance policies in place.

Clearly, these are just a few of many examples in which structured content can benefit the organization. The important takeaway is that you don’t have to live with your current content conundrums. You can relieve the pain and realize significant advantages by embracing structured content, in whatever department you happen to work.

Orginally authored by Dr. Bruce Sharpe, JustSystems

Solving the Provider Credentialing Paper Jam

Healthcare organizations are pressured to improve productivity and reduce costs, while meeting high quality standards and protecting patient confidentiality.

There are multiple workflows within multiple functional groups involved in patient care or physician credentialing that are ripe with inefficiencies. This article focuses on improving the workflow efficiencies in provider credentialing.

What is provider credentialing?
Hospitals are required to keep accurate records to verify that their physicians and other health care providers are adequately trained, certified and/or licensed. For example, all physicians and allied health practitioners must provide evidence of:

• Medical malpractice insurance
• DEA certification (controlled substance)
• State licensure
• Other certifications as required, such as:
• ACLS - Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support
• PALS - Pediatric Advanced Life Support
• PA - Physician Assistant Certification
• NLS - Newborn Life Support
• TLS - certification for trauma practice

Credentialing Paper Jams
Each healthcare organization now deals with a lengthy application process in order to understand the entire background of the healthcare provider professional. The collection and verification of the provider’s credentialing data is a very time-consuming, paper intensive, and deadline sensitive process.

Keeping critical credentialing information in paper form can result in inefficiencies, which can be costly in:

• Lost time manually auditing backup records stored in binders and remote storage, finding misplaced documents, and filing paper documents
• Documentation errors
• Lack of documentation security
• The need to hire Temporary personnel to meet process deadlines
• Physician denial to practice if records have expired

Click here to begin taking advantage of our document management expertise!

What is Document Management?

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Digital Document Storage Reduces Costs

The average office worker spends up to half of their workday searching for simple information! No wonder it’s hard to increase production. A digital document storage system will not only increase worker productivity, but also reduce company costs.

Lost documents create ripples of inefficiency throughout any organization. Although small and medium sized organizations are often hit harder than large corporations, the effect is devastating across the board. In paper-based environments, digital document storage is a great alternative. These systems provide an easy-to-use, secure document storage alternative to ultimately boost productivity and reduce operating expenses.

Digital Document Imaging

The process of converting paper documents into electronic files serves as the catalyst for today’s innovative electronic document storage systems. These systems allow documents to be captured at their source and enable organizations to reduce manual operational errors which frequently result in lost or misplaced documents.

In general, today’s electronic storage systems are less expensive, more secure, easier to use and more reliable than traditional methods. Many companies can also choose to integrate scanning, storage and paper-to-digital technology into existing processes at any time for a more gradual and cost-effective transition.

Davis Business Machines can assist your organization today! Click here to begin taking advantage of our consultation expertise.

Are you scanning your electronic documents?

I know of a lot of people that have a need to create a document as an image. They first print the document then put the document into their scanner so they have an image. I don’t get it.

There are plenty of tools that can be used to create an image of your documents. You could use Adobe Acrobat, eCopy PaperWorks and a myriad of other tools. You could even use the Microsoft Document Image Writer that comes free with your computer. All you have to do is go to file and select print. Select the Microsoft Document Image Writer as your printer and then choose to save the file as an image that can be converted into a tiff image.

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, one choice may be better than another. If you need help, let us know what you want to accomplish and we can give you a solution. You may already have all the technology you need to get it done and all we'll have to do is teach you how to do it.

8 Document Management Practices that are Cost Effective and Eco Friendly

As leading economic indicators continue to signal a global economic slowdown, companies are looking for effective steps to take – such as lowering costs and streamlining operations – in order to weather the storm and achieve a competitive edge in the eventual recovery. At the same time, recent industry research shows that businesses also want to be more environmentally responsible.

There are several document management practices that can help companies reach both their environmental and cost-reduction goals. From the sustainability perspective, these practices can significantly reduce the use of paper, thereby saving trees, gas in shipping the paper, physical space to store it, and halting the eventual destruction of many files that end up in a landfill. According to the Environmental Paper Network, “If, for example, the United States cut its office paper use by roughly 10 percent, or 540,000 tons, greenhouse gases would fall by 1.6 million tons. This is the equivalent of taking 280,000 cars off the road for a year.”

Here are eight guidelines highlighting document management practices in the office that can benefit the environment and reduce costs:

1. The workgroup alternative

To the extent possible, replacing personal desktop printers with workgroup MFPs (multifunction peripherals that combine print/copy/scan/fax functionality in one machine) shared by departments can have a strong positive impact. One financial services company replaced 1,100 copiers and printers and 1,000 fax machines with 400 MFPs. The initiative eliminated 1,700 machines that no longer consume resources based on their manufacture, transportation, operation, maintenance, and eventual disposal.

2. Adopt scanning practices

Instead of copying and storing physical documents, organizations can scan and store electronically. Employees can retain digital copies that they can distribute electronically, and at the same time avoid accumulating files filled with paper.

As a conservative estimate, scanning can reduce paper consumption by one to three percent. In a recent industry survey, senior executives involved in document management indicated that document scanning has a high impact across the greatest range of business goals that include reducing costs, increasing competitive advantage, enhancing regulatory compliance, and improving customer service.

3. Default to duplex

Most multi-page documents don’t require the text to be printed on one side of the page. Newspapers, magazines and books use both sides (duplex printing). With effective fleet management it is possible to change office practices and make duplex printing of multi-page documents the norm. This can potentially decrease paper use by up to 50 percent.

4. Eliminate printing banner pages

A banner page is the extra page that prints before an employee’s file prints with username and machine name information. Gartner’s research estimates that organizations can reduce their consumables cost by up to 20 percent by eliminating banner pages from office print jobs. Banner pages can represent up to a quarter of pages printed for some typical office print jobs. A 1,000 person organization could cut up 1.6 million pages and save $33,500 per year by eliminating banner page printing (“Cost Cutting Initiatives for Office Printing,” Sharon McNee and Ken Weilerstein, Feb. 2008.)

5. Bulk up

Buying paper and toner in bulk can reduce transportation, packaging, and storage resources. Buying in bulk also often results in cost savings.

6. Leverage “smart” technologies

Enterprises can use MFP “smart” technologies such as Personal Mail Box, Fax-from-Desktop, Scan-to-Email/File Folder, and Document Routing in order to decrease paper and chemicals used in printing. This can reduce paper usage by up to three percent.

7. Implement user authentication

With as many as one in 10 documents sent to the printer and uncollected or sent again before collection to correct user errors, enterprises could reduce ad hoc print costs by up to 10 percent by implementing a PIN authentication system.

8. Put more text on each page

Paper usage can be reduced by changing a few default settings that will result in more text on each page. For example, in MS Word, you can go to “File,” then to “Page Setup” and set the margins to accommodate more text. Compared to the normal settings, this could use up to 14 percent less paper. Additionally, when printing, you can reduce font size to 10 point to decrease the amount of paper required.

Davis Business Machines can assist your organization today! Click here to begin taking advantage of our consultation expertise

Originally authored by Ken Neal, a Certified Enterprise Content Management Practitioner.