YugaTech | PC Labs

The folks from eCopy Corporation (Sharp) invited me to their office the other week to check out their line of Sharp enterprise and office printers. These are not your usual printers that sit in the office corner waiting for another piece of paper to chew on. They are what’s normally referred to as multi-function printers or MFPs (that’s fax, scan, print in a single machine).

I haven’t personally bought or used any Sharp printers. The only one I own at home is a telephone and fax machine from Sharp which lasted me over 5 years. So when the unit finally conked out, I bought the same exact model as replacement.

When I arrived at their office, I was greeted by some of the biggest printers I’ve ever seen; some are even larger than office desks and spans several meters wide.

The first thing that came to my mind is what could a large printer do that a much smaller and more portable one could not?

Turns out there’s a lot and I learned all about them in the hour or so that they showed me how these things worked.

These printers are oftentimes wired into the business process of an entire office and can sometimes even extended to several remote locations. As such, additional features are embedded into the machines — like a touchscreen display terminal to help manage print jobs, log users, monitor resources. They demoed how you can actually modify a print job (re-arrange, re-orient or remove slides) right in the printer before running it.

The printers are also hooked up to the network via a LAN port (I am told there’s a way to make it wireless but future models will have built-in WiFi capabilities).

Setting up the MFPs will require some sort of business process analysis of the company that’s going to use it. This is because a system needs to be configured to maximize it use, adapt to the business flow and probably even cut some unnecessary processes.

For example, the scanning of a PO (Purchase Order) goes thru the MFP. It is then electronically routed to the concerned officers which will then digitally approve it. That triggers a new set of documents (soft copy) to be routed, digitally signed and then printed out.

The entire process happens in the network (mostly email and web panel) and no actual documents are passed on from one department (or person) to another until it is finally needed to be printed out. In a way, they save on unnecessary printing costs, shortens the fulfillment or turn-around time and cuts down on man-hours.

I am told that some government offices that used this customized system (from eCopy/Sharp) are able to cut down the turn-around time of documents from 5 days to just under 15 minutes. I guess a lot of gov’t service departments can greatly benefit from this — I’m thinking NSO certificates, NBI clearances, LTO registrations and even DFA documents can be expedited if they only automate their system.

There’s a caveat though. Some of these machines don’t come cheap. The high-end ones are very expensive they could reach up to half a million. Of course, that’s like a 5-year investment there (probably longer). The smaller ones can are more affordable and in the Php50k and up range.

It’s interesting to note though that if you don’t want an outright purchase of these MFPs, there’s an option to actually just rent it out from eCopy. Another option is to actually just set up a Pay-per-Use financing (much like renting it out but you only pay for the amount of prints or scans that you make).

This tour has actually changed the way I looked at these humongous printers. They’re definitely just not any dumb machine that sits in the corner of the office. Rolling it out certainly involves a lot of planning and changes in business processes.

Disclosure: eCopy is the exclusive distributor of Sharp MFPs (multi-function printers) in the Philippines. They are also a banner display advertiser on this blog.