Office Automation, DMS Offer Big Opportunity with Huge First-Mover Advantage

A digital DMS addresses key challenges that manual document management falls short, explains K Bhaskhar, Senior Vice President, BIS Segment, Canon India, in a brief conversation with Amit Singh as he highlights opportunities and huge first-mover advantage in this space. He also underlined the major push from BFSI organizations towards digitization and document management systems as printing space undergoes optimization

As businesses are looking at the hybrid workplace model to counter the challenges brought about by the pandemic and the realities of the new normal, how do you think the importance of office automation and document management systems is increasing?

The hybrid workplace set-up will see employees visiting offices to meet the needs of collaboration or decision making, while they will continue to complete regular work responsibilities from home. Given that employees will continue to work from multiple locations, document management solutions will make it easier to manage all the data and documents in one place and automate tasks such as classification and processing.

If we look at the overall printing and office automation segment, the printing space is undergoing major optimization. While we can link printing to the overall health and growth of the organization, optimization in printing will happen where only necessary prints are taken. Here scanning is taking the lead as a part of the workflow solution, which enables people to avoid taking unnecessary printouts but the final ones.

This in turn helps to improve productivity by making it easier to collaborate across teams. Hence, document management systems enable organizations to go paperless by storing all of the data and documents in a single cloud-secured location.

I see office automation and document management systems as a big opportunity with a huge first-mover advantage. Canon has taken a first-mover advantage in this space, which has also enabled us to retain the #1 position in the mono and color segments over the last six years.

Automation at the workplace is not a new concept. But, its need across segments especially BFSI hasn’t been more intensely felt as it is today to adapt and thrive to post-Covid business realities. How have you supported this industry in dealing with its challenges amid the pandemic and beyond?

The BFSI industry has been the most impacted industry by the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic has forced financial organizations to incorporate digitization and digital workflows into their processes. As the banks have digitalized their processes from account opening and KYC to banking transactions including fixed deposits, document management systems have become crucial for necessary documentation and compliance. Moreover, document management systems are not only about making processes digitized but also bringing more efficiency to the workflows.

Further, digitization and document management systems offer an opportunity to incorporate artificial intelligence to further automate the processes. At Canon, we offer solutions with AI capabilities that allow the efficient capture, retrieval, index, and archival of information, improving the workflow of documents in small-sized or large-scale enterprises. Our IRISXtract solution captures the data from any incoming document and integrates it automatically into your business applications.

How crucial is BFSI as a segment for Canon and how exactly the BFSI segment contributes to your business?

With the government’s focus on financial inclusion with its JandhanYojana and similar initiatives for account opening, credit, remittances, and insurance, we have seen a major push from BFSI organizations towards digitization and document management systems. In addition, we are seeing a lot of expansion and consolidation in the BFSI space, which is driving efforts toward cost optimization and process efficiencies. With the push toward bringing the TCO of the systems down, Canon has been able to offer relevant printing and document management solutions to bring down their workflow costs and efforts. We are certainly bringing in a lot of value add to the enterprises in the BFSI sector.

Can you also talk about your recent business achievements over the last 12-18 months?

In our business imaging solutions division, we have observed YoY growth of over 10-12 percent for the last many years. The year 2020 was of course a dip for us during the first wave of Covid-19. However, in 2021 we outdid our 2019 numbers by a significant margin. We are poised to attain around 10 percent growth over the revenues in 2019.

With our sustained efforts to promote color printing as an excellent medium to draw attention to important areas, we have seen tremendous adoption of color printers and MFDs. This has enabled us to maintain the #1 position in color machines for almost the last six years. People are now aware that color printing is no more expensive. Above all, adding colors to the black and white printouts makes them much more attractive and easier to read. For Canon, color contributes almost 25 percent of the volumes. So, color is the way forward for printing.

What is the role channel partners play in delivering your printing solutions to the end customers? Please also talk about your channel roadmap.

Channel is always a pillar of strength for us and our growth is associated with and driven by the channel partners. Our channel roadmap is focused on color printing. I am of the firm opinion that color is gaining significant traction as organizations move towards print optimization with a focus on lesser but impactful prints in color.

Hence, we are training partners on positioning their portfolios and driving conversations around color. Most importantly, we are training partners towards solution selling where they can position intelligent printing solutions including role-based access to color printouts, and statistics of color and monoprints. As the printing machines are getting more intelligent than earlier, partners can bundle a smart and interesting proposal for their customers.

Offering a differentiation from the competition enable our partners to stick with us for a long-term association. Many of our partners have been associated with us for over 20-23 years. The average life of a partner association with us is over 7-8 years. We ensure to offer them something new every year and keep them engaged. Moreover, we engage with the salespeople of the partners as our extended sales team and impart product skills and keep them motivated.