When one thinks about threats to organizational security, the words hackers and computer viruses come to mind. In this world of network attacks, printers, copiers and fax machines are easy to overlook. These systems can store trade secrets, financial and medical information, and valuable information like customer lists or pricing schedules. Loss of this information could be devastating.

The good news is that there are practical steps you can take to improve the security of your printers and copiers.

1. Track Printing Access

Output tracking technologies can keep a record of which documents are printed. You can access the printing logs to see what documents an employee has printed. Your staff will know that the company is monitoring information security thus creating an environment where employees are hesitant to steal information through the printer.

2. Encrypt Hard Drives on Multifunction Systems

When you scan a document on a multifunction system the scanned image is stored on the device’s hard drive before it is sent off to an email address or network folder location. New security technologies can encrypt documents on the multifunction system’s hard drive and make sure files are erased after they have been transmitted.

A new report by Datamonitor argues that many organizations waste 10% of their staff costs because employees can not find the right information to do their jobs. Over 50% of staff costs are now for employees performing “information work”. But the employees are suffering from both information overload and information underload, and as a result they spend up to 25% of their day searching for the right information. Datamonitor argues that this why some organizations could be frittering away as much as 10% of their staff costs on wasted effort.

The Background

Success in the manufacturing sector hinges on constantly becoming more efficient with the use of valuable resources. A large suburban Chicago food manufacturer recently decided that they wanted to use the same methodology for efficiency that had made them successful in the production process and apply it to their document workflow. The company faced redundancies in handling documents that cost them time and money.

The Solution

Working with Martin Whalen Office Solutions, the company was able to get to the root of the problem. Staff were making copies of essential paperwork, faxes, and orders and hand delivering them throughout their large facility. Martin Whalen was able to provide a customized solution that had all of the faxes delivered electronically while paper documents were able to be scanned and sent via e-mail.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
New, powerful document distribution and management advances place imaging and output resources in an important role within critical business processes. These processes may be vertical, such as brokerage accounts, insurance claims, and FDA drug applications, or horizontal, such as invoicing and HR documentation. As a result of these trends, imaging and output resources are now being included in efforts to align business goals with IT and in efforts to maximize the return on all IT resources.

The process of optimizing the imaging and output infrastructure inevitably reveals unnecessarily high costs and underutilized assets. Indeed, for this White Paper we studied nine large enterprises in the United States, Europe, and Asia and found the majority of organizations studied reported major problems related to overall cost awareness of their imaging hardware, their ability to assess device utilization, and high costs of maintaining an often aged and out-of-date fleet of printers, copiers, and multifunction devices. Based on the experiences of these nine companies and other IDC research, this White Paper looks at the unnecessary costs and inefficiencies that typically exist within these resources and the significant opportunities to achieve cost savings, boost employee productivity, and speed up core business processes from tighter integration between the document advances of hardcopy devices and business process workflows.