What other new features should businesses be aware of?
One of the new innovations in MFDs is a device that will actually be updated throughout the term of the lease. People want to lease their devices for a longer period but hesitate because they don’t want something that is going to be obsolete.
A popular new feature is the ability to create fillable forms. Every business has a lot of forms they use — sales orders, equipment requests, expense reimbursements, etc. — but they are often just hard copies, and today’s businesses need electronic copies, as well.
Another new feature is advanced scanning. Most systems have been able to scan to a PDF for a long time. There is nothing revolutionary there, but the most innovative multifunction devices now allow you to scan a hard copy document directly to Word or Excel or a variety of other formats, like a text-searchable PDF. Before, if you wanted to reuse some of the content from an old hard copy document, you were forced to retype it. But today’s newest copiers offer the ability to hit one button and have the document delivered in Word or Excel, which eliminates the need to retype documents.
If a law firm needed to search through a 200-page contract for a few keywords, a text-searchable PDF would find those words or phrases in the document, saving hours of time.
Another hot feature is color-enabled devices, which allow you to do marketing material on demand. In the past, you would have to go to a commercial printer to print your literature. But you can’t go to a commercial printer and buy 300 brochures. You have to buy thousands to get a reasonable cost per piece. Reports show as much as 40 percent of those preprinted pieces are discarded because they’re obsolete before they get used. By making custom brochures for each presentation or meeting, you increase your impact.
