South Australian building company, Eden Living, enjoys the benefits of document management
At a glance
Listen to the tender
The workload
Software Solution
The Canon difference
Business today
At a glance
Eden Living
Eden Living was established in 1999 to be an umbrella name for a number of companies that have been operating in South Australia since 1977. It's tagline seeks to embody the company's attitude as a whole - "Our spirit is building"
Industry
Building
Geographies
Fullarton, South Australia
Canon Products Used
imageRUNNER iR C3200
imageRUNNER iR2220i
imageRUNNER iR3320i
imageWARE Scan Manager
imageWARE Document Manager
"Canon came back with the best solution by far. Not only did it cover printing, but also document management, which I hadn't thought of at that point. All the other vendors did was replace the photocopiers and change the printers around, and that's not what I wanted. Canon put its mind to what I really needed and listened to what I said."
Paul Cole, Financial Controller, Eden Living
Talk to anyone involved with the building industry and they will tell you about the massive amounts of paperwork involved in building a new home, from the colour promotional material advertising home and land packages, to the brochures relating to individual house designs, to building plans, to the contracts involved when a new homebuyer decides to authorise a contract, a vast amount of paper is generated and used, daily.
Eden Living, based in Adelaide's inner suburb of Fullarton, has a reputation as an innovative Builder, always seeking to set new benchmarks in design and customer service. Peter Eden, the Principal has always invested in new technology and was frustrated by the constraints of the current system.
"Coming from large corporate environments, I was used to having one or two central printers and everyone collected their printing from them," said Paul Cole, Financial Controller at Eden Living. "When I came here, I could see that things needed to change. I approached a few vendors and said, 'I've inherited an office with 10 printers attached to people's PCs. I want a real printing solution.'"
Listen to the tender
Canon Australia was one of the vendors approached by Mr Cole with this request. Canon duly evaluated the potential at Eden Living and suggested not only a printing solution, but an imaging philosophy which incorporated a document management solution, which would bring efficiency benefits to any such a paper-hungry office.
"Canon came back with the best solution by far. Not only did it cover printing, but also document management, which I hadn't thought of at that point," said Mr Cole. "All the other vendors did was replace the photocopiers and change the printers around, and that's not what I wanted. Canon put its mind to what I really needed and listened to what I said."
The solution suggested by Canon comprised three printing devices - imageRUNNER iR C3200; imageRUNNER iR2220i; and imageRUNNER iR3320i; in addition to imageWARE Scan Manager and imageWARE Document Manager software.
Mr Cole could see that this consolidation of printing equipment would prove to be a real business benefit for Eden Living, as it could replace its two old photocopiers for two new black and white multifunction devices (iR2220i and iR3320i) and one colour (iR C3200) for less than the business was paying for the old set up. The only extra cost incurred by the business on top of its usual spending was for the software solution.
The workload
"When I announced the new printing environment, I got all the usual grumbles about people having to get out of their chairs to pick up printing, but I pointed out that it's not a bad thing," said Mr Cole. "To get people up and out of their seat and mixing with other people in the office is actually a very good thing."
Office interaction aside, the new devices are also helping Eden Living to plough through an enormous amount of printed material on a daily basis. When a new home is being built, for example, Eden Living has to print the plans and specifications seven or eight times at an average of 20 pages of A3 or A4 paper, per home, in addition to all the routine office paperwork.
Being able to install a colour device alongside the two black and white workhorses has also enabled Eden Living to take some of its marketing work in-house, such as colour flyers, which it will print in runs of at least 500 in-house before it even thinks about outsourcing its printing requirements to the local quick print shop. Similarly, although its company magazine is printed offsite, its creation and proofing is done in-house, using an Apple Macintosh, connected to the colour imageRUNNER iR C3200.
"The colour unit is just great and has enabled us to come up with a marketing idea and say 'lets do this' and, presto, it's done," said Mr Cole. "We don't have to worry about where or when we'll get it printed - or even how many prints we need to make. If we need more of a particular colour flyer or brochure, we simply print more."
Software Solution
Although, by his own admission, the software brought into the solution wasn't something which Mr Cole had originally factored into his requirements, he soon realised the way in which Canon had analysed and truly understood his needs when he saw the raw power of using the two programs working in tandem with the multifunction printing devices it had also purchased. Through understanding Eden Living's requirements, Canon's valuable, proactive recommendations had clearly highlighted its experience and understanding of the market and its customers in a way that other vendors simply couldn't come close to replicating.
"On one side of the business, we receive invoices from suppliers and subcontractors. Because of the volume, to physically pull out one of these documents even after a few months is difficult as we have to store them offsite," said Mr Cole. "Now, with the Canon software, once an invoice is scanned, it's in the system and, if you know the invoice number, you can pull it up on your screen in seconds, rather than spend hours, or even days, waiting for it to be found."
Another back office area where Eden Living is going to use the scanning solution quite extensively is through the scanning of contracts once they've been signed, so it doesn't have to keep hard copies on the premises or offsite.
The other side of the business to benefit from the scanning solution, explained Mr Cole, is the creative area that involves home sketches, architectural designs and other artistic creations that need to be shared with new homebuyers and builders when building a home.
"The business has been going for 28 years and it's good if you can pull up any information from any time in the company's history, especially in a format you can edit - which you can do with this scanning solution," said Mr Cole. "We've only just started scanning all this creative material into the system, but when we're finished we will be able to pull up any design, update it if we want to, or just print them off to show people who might be interested in a particular design."
imageWARE Scan Manager is a production-level image capture and indexing front-end that includes advanced imaging functions, such as zone OCR, barcode and forms recognition, pre/post indexing, and input masking functions. The documents and associated indices are released to imageWARE Document Manager for storage, retrieval, viewing, and authorized editing.
imageWARE Document Manager Enterprise Edition, meanwhile, performs the functions of database storage, audit trail management and reporting, and provides web-based document viewing to make the management of its documents a breeze.
The Canon difference
"With a few minor exceptions, the Canon printers and the software have been foolproof. Especially compared to one of the other units we had, where the downtime was just unbelievable, these units are really great," said Mr Cole. "Our key issue over the next few years will be monitoring downtime to see if we've made the right choice, but so far we're very happy indeed."
Staff have also come to love the new solution. Although the initial feedback to Mr Cole was muted because of the new situation where people no longer had a personal printer sitting on their desk, once they started to use the devices, they decided the right choice had been made.
"Staff like the new efficiencies of scanning documents straight to email, then sending them direct from the machine," said Mr Cole. "Sometimes we're building for people interstate, and we're now scanning correspondence and e-mailing it to people rather than posting or faxing it."
According to Mr Cole, the real value in the solution lies in the fact that Eden Living now believes it has a serious advantage over everyone else in its marketplace.
"Besides all the great things these new solutions are delivering, other advantages that we hadn't even thought of - like designing a home and land package and then sending a colour flyer to people the same day - are proving very successful," concluded Mr Cole. "It's just great."
Business today
While the new system requires labour to operate, Mr Hepple says it is more time efficient than filing and retrieving documents from the archive sheds, allowing Bartter Enterprises to redeploy employees to other tasks.
Productivity gains are apparent in other parts of the business, too. "Even now, with a task like sending invoices to our customers ? we can email it, whereas before it was always a matter of sticking an A3 invoice onto a photocopier, shrinking it down to A4 and then faxing it across," says Mr Hepple, by way of example.
Mr Hepple says it now costs Bartter Enterprises less than 3 cents per page to print an invoice or POD, which is a saving of more than 60% compared to the cost of overprinting these documents on preprinted stationery.
Before signing up for the Canon solution, Bartter Enterprises calculated that it would pay for itself in 12 months. With the system in place, Mr Hepple is completely confident that the system has met this demanding expectation.
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