Canon U.S.A. Honored with Multiple Awards from Buyers Laboratory, Inc.

(Lake Success, NY) - Continuing its tradition for technological innovation and high-quality imaging offerings, Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging and advanced office solutions, today announced the Company has been honored with five Fall 2009 "Pick" and Outstanding Achievement Awards by Buyers Laboratory, Inc. (BLI).

"As a Company, we pride ourselves on developing and offering our end-users the most innovative solutions, and we are honored to have received these prestigious accolades once again from Buyers Lab," said Sam Yoshida, vice president and general manager, Imaging Systems Group, Canon U.S.A. "These awards are a testament to Canon's dedication of providing a robust line up of high-quality, affordable imaging and document management solutions."

Spanning across a number of product lines, including the Company's new imageRUNNER ADVANCE multifunctional products (MFP), scanners and software, each award-winning product was recognized as "Outstanding" in its respective product category by BLI. Honors included:

• Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE Series – BLI's Outstanding Achievement Award for Ease of Use & Outstanding Achievement in Scanning - The new imageRUNNER ADVANCE Series was developed to seamlessly bridge the distance between user and MFP to transform and advance one's business and digital communications. Incorporating sophisticated workflows and innovative technologies, the Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE Series is designed to address the ever-growing needs of users, administrators and business decision makers to better manage and customize workflows, while accomplishing more tasks in less time and achieving higher levels of quality.
• Canon imageFORMULA DR-6050C – BLI's Pick for Outstanding Low-Volume Production Sheet-fed Scanner - Boasting scanning speeds of up to 70 pages-per-minute (ppm) and 140 images-per-minuteI (ipm), the image FORMULA DR-6050C is a fast, reliable and precise solution for several types of business environments. Designed with Canon's unique feeding mechanism, the DR-6050C production scanner features Ultrasonic Double Feed Detection, Rapid Recovery and Staple Detection to help ensure reliable document scanning, and three-line Contact Image Sensors (CIS) and dust-free shading mechanism allows for outstanding image quality.
• Canon imageRUNNER DR-9050C – BLI's Outstanding Achievement Award for Exceptional Value - A high-volume, high image-quality document management solution, the DR-9050C can scan at speeds up to 112 ppm/225 ipmI in color, grayscale and black and white. The DR-9050C captures images and text with clarity using three-line Contact Image Sensors at up to 600 dots-per-inch optical resolution, and incorporates a dust-free shading mechanism for exceptional image quality. Developed with Canon's unique feeding mechanism, the DR-9050C utilizes Ultrasonic Double Feed Detection, Rapid Recovery and Staple Detection to ensure reliable document scanning.
• Canon imageWARE Secure Audit Manager – BLI's Pick for Outstanding Document Security Solution - imageWARE Secure Audit Manager is a robust and efficient information security software solution for document distribution oversight. This solution carves a new concept in the information security industry. It is the first product to provide capture, archive, and audit capabilities of Canon device activities such as print, scan, fax, copy, and send jobs. imageWARE Secure Audit Manager captures job attribute information such as time, date, user, as well as text and image data. After this information is captured, it's stored in a centralized database where it can be readily searched using one of three search features: full text search, attribute search, and image search. With this solution, companies and organizations can reduce risks and liabilities associated with the leakage of important and confidential information.

Twice a year, BLI, a leading independent office equipment test lab, rewards those products that have provided the most outstanding performances in BLI's exhaustive lab tests with its "Pick" awards. Testing requirements cover reliability, image quality, ease-of-use, productivity, multitasking abilities, print drivers, administrative utilities and a variety of network connectivity requirements. Typical testing lasts approximately two months and includes extensive durability testing where each unit is run at the manufacturer's maximum recommended monthly volume. To learn why BLI selected these models to win its prestigious awards, read the press releases on the home page of BLI's web site at www.buyerslab.com.

About Buyers Laboratory
For 48 years, Buyers Lab (BLI) has been the leading independent office-equipment testing lab and business consumer advocate. In addition to publishing the industry's most comprehensive and accurate test reports on office document imaging devices, each representing months of exhaustive hands-on testing in BLI's U.S. and UK laboratories, the company has been the leading source of competitive intelligence for industry professionals on copiers, printers, fax machines, scanners, duplicators, wide-format devices and multifunctional products. The company's databases cover over 12,000 products globally and have a long-standing reputation for being the industry's most trustworthy and complete source for specifications and side-by-side comparisons, all of which are available as part of bliQ, BLI's web-based encyclopedic resource. Subscribers also have access to BLI's renowned Lab Test Reports, First Look Reports, Solutions Reports, Environmental Reports, news articles and a complete library of manufacturer's product literature, as well as valuable tools including a Product Configurator and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator.

Buyers Lab also provides business consumers with How-To-Guides, a Needs Assessment Wizard and Free Vendor Quotes via its Buyers Lab Advisor website, as well as independent purchasing advice and consulting from its Buyers Alliance procurement experts. Business consumers and manufacturers can also select from a vast array of confidential for-hire private testing services that include document imaging device beta and pre-launch testing, performance certification testing, consumables and print media testing, and software solutions testing.

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.

Why Businesses Should Utilize an Electronic Document Management System

In today’s business world, the amount of paper a business manages can be endless. With each piece of paper, someone needs to file it, space must be used to store it, and on multiple occasions, someone needs to retrieve it. When you are talking about thousands and even millions of pages of paper, this can be a very time-consuming task, and therefore a very costly task. The costs mount up quickly, in the areas of wages for employees who are responsible for filing and retrieving documents, and the areas of storage space required to house the massive amounts of paper files.

It is also an on-going, never-ending task, requiring the time of countless employees. This is time that could be better used performing the tasks that they have their personal expertise in. The opportunity costs for using a paper filing system include wasted time, delayed customer response time, and wasted floor and storage space. In other words, the efficiency of a business is very much hampered by continuing to utilize a paper filing system.

The benefits of an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) are countless. With an EDMS, you will be able to take all of paper files, put them through a scanner, and them throw them away, or if your too skeptical to toss them, you can store them in some off-site storage where you will hopefully never have to look at them again. All of your files will be stored electronically, accessible almost instantly by any computer within your office at anytime. You do not have to worry about misplaced files or somebody else already having a file at their desk.

The initial cost of converting to an EDMS is usually what keeps people from doing it. This cost consists of the time and money it takes to scan all of a company’s existing files into the system. To save time, a company can pay a scanning service bureau to scan all their files for them, and this will sometimes be the cheapest method as opposed to paying an employee, who is likely less efficient, to scan the files. Whatever the method chosen, the first year cost might be heavy, but these costs should be offset within the first couple of years.

Another route that a lot of companies take is not to scan all of their backfiles into the EDMS, but to start scanning files today as they come in, and leaving all previous files as they were. This allows the company to bypass a large part of the initial costs, while still enjoying the benefits of the electronic file storage. As time goes by and the companies appreciation for the system grows, they will slowly convert their older files into electronic images, allowing them spread this cost over many months or even years.

Once a company is completely paperless and utilizing an EDMS, their efficiency is greatly increased, their response time for customer support is drastically reduced, and their overall office clutter is eliminated. These improvements convert directly to more business and higher profits.

If that’s not enough to convince you, then this will. The company is no longer at risk to having their critical business information stolen, lost, or destroyed due to some unforeseen circumstances, such as Hurricane Katrina that destroyed thousands of business’s paper records. The EDMS can backup your files offsite so nothing will ever be lost, plus its security features will prevent unauthorized individuals from accessing the documents that they shouldn’t, a very difficult task with a paper filing system.

Document Management Systems Can Enrich The Bottom Line In A Down Economy

In these undecided economic times, countless companies are faced with the challenge of how to maximize returns on stretched budgets. It's a do-more-with-less strategy that requires business operations be optimized now to meet existing economic realities.

One area to consider for improving the bottom line is to look at how information is managed throughout the organization, particularly document management. This involves all the content, things like documents, invoices, etc.; all the actions, things like reviews, and approvals; and all the processes, these are the repeatable steps that drive the flow of information. Improving how information is managed, the content, actions, and processes, will improve efficiency, reduce risk, and lead to cost savings.

There is another benefit to consider with this as well, and it's a silver lining. With any change comes opportunity, and the right kind of change now can position an organization for even greater success long term.

There are least seven ways that improvements in how information is managed can influence the bottom line in terms of efficiency, risk and cost savings, and here they are:

1. Make information findable so people can find information, instantly, every day.
   Studies have shown that among those who are involved with the flow of information, about one-half spend two hours per day looking for what they need to do their jobs. This can translate to hundreds of thousands of dollars in unproductive cost per year. The aim is to cut down on the time it takes for people to find information, making them more efficient and able to complete their tasks much faster.
2. Automate business processes
   Manual processes, especially those that involve paper, have a real propensity to breakdown. As information is routed in steps, for example in review or approval cycles, it's often delayed, there are interruptions, and any number of user-influenced errors can occur. These practices are a real challenge to manage for accountability. At any point in the process, it's difficult to identify at which step the process is currently in. And looking back at completed processes, it's very difficult to identify who did what and when. Consequently, business processes tend to be slow, taking days or weeks to run their course. And it's this lack of speed, not mention the errors, that are the real burdens on efficiency. Automating processes using workflow eliminates the need for people to manage processes and allows people to focus their expertise on making decisions and adding knowledge. The flow of information is handled automatically, which not only establishes consistent processing of information, but also shortens cycle times, increases accountability, and leads to greater quality and accuracy of repeatable business process.
3. Improve collaboration
   A large number of companies still use shared file servers to store information, email to share it, and sometimes FTP to exchange files back and forth. But here's the problem: these methods are unstructured and disconnected. Managing information in this way lacks the necessary controls and collaborative tools to make the most efficient use of corporate knowledge. Files are easily duplicated or lost, information has to be re-created, and versioning is ad-hoc at best. Even worse, in some instances files are silo'd into line-of-business applications, for example a project management application that is only accessible to a few in the company. The answer to improving collaboration is creating a unified, enterprise, work environment where people and knowledge are connected company-wide. This allows all employees, no matter what area of the business they are in, to leverage the collective intelligence of an organization.
4. Capture a record of every change.
   Without a system to manage files as they change, it is virtually certain that information will be lost, it will be difficult to reassemble later on, and there will be confusion surrounding which are the correct versions of files. Documents are not static. They change over time. Automated version control offers a standardized way to capture and organize information in what would otherwise be a chaotic and uncontrolled process. People are more productive and the risk of information loss is greatly reduced. Plus, with version control, everyone immediately knows which is the current version, while previous versions are always retrievable. Another plus of version control is that it can reduce risk. Version control eliminates the potential for losing content in prior versions and importantly, it allows for visibility over content history, for example who approved a document and what did the content look like at that time.
5. Reduce the risk of email.
   Email may be fast, cheap, and convenient, but it's a mistake to believe that it's an informal mode of communication. Email is more and more falling under the scope of regulations such as eDiscovery. For this reason alone, it's important to view email as business records. But even beyond regulation, there are other aspects of how we use email today that make it more and more essential to consider when reducing risk factors. In many cases emails are used as a principle means of communication among employees, as well as with people outside the company, like customers or vendors. The content within emails, and files attached to them, are often times the most complete and thorough record of history over time. Your ability to quickly research and retrieve information from an email archive not only improves your chances of successfully complying with regulations and legal requirements, but it also helps with matters like researching and exchanging knowledge in hand-offs between people, say for example in times of employee transition.
6. Maintain compliance with regulations
   As with email records, some companies also face regulatory requirements that affect all types of information. Information itself can be a liability if it is incorrectly managed. Studies vary widely, but some have indicated that as much as 80% of documents reside on user's desktops, beyond the control and management of a structured document management system. Government regulations, quality standards, and legal requirements are an increasing challenge, and programs that manage for compliance by documenting policies and procedures, applying consistent business processes, and securing information are necessary to reduce exposure to risk. Where quality standards and compliance exist, such as ISO, FDA, and Sarbanes-Oxley, regulated content and processes must be managed using records management.
7. Eliminate paper storage costs and go Paperless.
   Long established storage of paper documents in filing cabinets, archive boxes, and off-site warehouses is a no-value solution. The expenditures of all that paper storage - the space and money spent on it - offers no return in value to the company. It's an unnecessary operational cost. Filing cabinets eat up valuable office space that could otherwise be used for meaningful and productive work areas; and money spent on off-site storage in warehouses could be invested in areas of business that actually have a positive return on the bottom line. When documents are stored electronically, however, there's an added value because information can be filed, searched and retrieved instantly. This is a big factor in terms of process efficiency. And there are other areas to consider as well: electronic document storage makes information more accessible, including even outside the office for employees who might be traveling, working at home, at satellite offices, or perhaps even vendors and customers. When documents are accessed, changed, or approved, everything is recorded in an audit log. Electronic document storage also makes it easier to plan for business continuity, so records can be restored quickly and the business can get immediately back up and running. And finally, electronic document storage is a greener, paperless approach that not only reduces storage and its associated costs, but also cuts down on the need for paper and printing.

Speed Up Customer Service with Document Management

The fast paced world of business requires you to move with it and keep up with the demands of customers who want everything immediately. This means that everything in your office must (if possible) be automated in order for your staff to act swiftly and efficiently.

One of the aspects of your business that you need to invest in to improve processes is document management. Manual ranking and filing of paper documents is time consuming and many business these days invest in electronic document management to help them efficiently manage their files and in turn act on customer demands speedily.

Electronic document management systems, such as those provided by Davis Business Machines (http://www.dbm.net), is not only about instantly retrieving information but it also allows you to text search the actual body of a document together with the title. And what’s even better about it is that it actually highlights the search terms you need so you can go directly to the information you want-therefore saving time spent searching for documents especially when your in a hurry.

This can tremendously help improve your company’s efficiency-everything will be at your fingertips with just a touch of a button. You can load all your customer records within seconds together with other correspondence, even references and emails about the client which have been sent internally.

The superb features of electronic document management speak for themselves. Customer information is instantly accessible so you can answer customer queries on the spot. And since you’ll have an audit trail of past transactions and communications at your fingertips with each particular customer, no risk of error can occur.

What’s even better is that you don’t even have to ask your customer to wait while you find the relevant information they need, or call them back; you are easily positioned as an efficient company that really values and takes all your customers seriously.

It goes without saying that speed of service is crucial if you want to stay ahead of the competition. Electronic document management can help you do this and more. And as everyone is aware of, keeping your existing customers is way cheaper than acquiring new ones. So investing in electronic document management will help your business save more money and in the long run acquire new customers courtesy of the satisfied ones.

December 2009 Edition of the Canon "Highlights" Newsletter

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

• Message
• Year in Review
• 2009 New Product Highlights
• 2009 Award and Recognition Highlights
• 2009 Event Highlights
• Canon Micro Sites

The newsletter may be found by clicking here.

Paper that works?

Did you know, on average companies have to hire an additional employee for every 12 filing cabinets simply to maintain organization. This is just the beginning of what it costs to manage paper documents in an increasingly digital world. Whether you are looking for a way to improve personal or professional productivity, capture and distribute paper-based information among workgroups, departments, and small businesses, or even blend multiple business applications from networked printers/copiers or scanners, Document Management Solutions can securely transform paper documents into business value.

Paperwork is paper that works… Document management solutions turn everyday tasks into routine processes that take less time, involve fewer steps, and allow employees to accomplish more. Enabling document management stops the inefficiency inherent in paper files and achieve greater productivity, better information management, and lower overhead expense - a benefit to any bottom line.

• Increasing operational efficiency.
• Making business applications more productive.
• Delivering financial advantage to the bottom line.

A document management solution accommodates any business environment. Ideally, the amount of storage required for paper documents would be reduced, make any document instantly retrievable, and securely bridge the paper and digital worlds.

Contact us today to take advantage of our document management expertise.

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