En Route To The 'Paperless' Office

With a web of 35,000 gas stations worldwide, the promise of a paperless office remains far down the road for petroleum behemoth Exxon Mobil. But with the help of systems integrator Cutting Edge Solutions, selective use of distributed scanning is fueling new efficiencies in corporate bill handling and document sharing.

The effort is paying off by expediting the way Exxon Mobil handles property tax bills and assessments for its properties. In the past, accountants at the oil giant's

Houston headquarters were inundated with paper tax notices, all of which had to be processed immediately to avoid missing appeals deadlines. Now one tax assistant can scan tax bills and assessments, route the data to tax and financial officials across the company's global network, and quickly collect decisions on whether to appeal an assessment or simply pay the bill.

"They are talking about rolling it out to all 200 employees in the tax department," says Jack Roberts, a vice president at Cutting Edge in Kansas City, Mo. "Not just to handle tax bills and assessments but any document they get in and to hopefully get in as close as they can get to a paperless environment."

Cutting Edge rolled out the solution for Exxon Mobil earlier this year. The system is based on a new Fujitsu scanner and upgraded document-capture software called Taskmaster from DataCap. While Exxon Mobil, which just topped the Fortune 500 last month may still be far from a paperless office, the project is an example of a growing trend among enterprises of all sizes that are finding new uses for distributed scanning. Many, like Exxon Mobil, are leaning toward more widespread use of data-capture hardware and software among workgroups, rather than just in central organizations, where typically large volumes of documents are scanned.

Documents increasingly need to be scanned to comply with the growing wave of regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes- Oxley. That, as well as a desire to lower costs, is helping to push document scanning toward a distributed model, analysts note.

And thanks to a new crop of desktop and workgroup scanners, it's easier and more affordable than ever for companies to distribute workloads where documents must be scanned and processed. Canon, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, Ricoh and Visioneer have rolled out new scanners recently with many more on the way, officials at those companies say.

Workgroup and departmental scanners are the fastest-growing segment of the market, according to market researcher InfoTrends. Based on its most recent assessment, revenue for workgroup scanners is forecast to be $354 million this year, an increase of more than 60 percent from $257 million in 2004.

"Distributed scanning is becoming more popular, as organizations can now justify moving away from the centralized model," InfoTrends analyst Jon Franke says.

Helping to drive that trend is the availability of higher functionality at less cost. A full-duplex production scanner that just five years ago may have cost $10,000 now costs less than $2,000, says Scott Francis, director of product marketing at Fujitsu's scanner unit. "As scanners have come down in price, it's more viable to put a scanner at the point of paper creation," Francis says.

NEXT: But that begs the question: Who needs a scanner when many all-in-one multifunction printers have scanning capability?

"MFPs really work on a different set of economics," says John Capurso, vice president of marketing at Visioneer, which markets document scanners under the Xerox brand.

MFPs are more driven by consumables, whereas scanners have high-end features such as duplex scanning and software bundles that include the likes of KoFax VRS, a robust data-capture application, he says. Fujitsu's Francis agrees, noting that the company's duplex scanners now have twin cameras, enabling a two-sided document to be scanned in a single pass.

Naturally, a vendor that doesn't make MFPs will make a case that standalone scanners are better. Several do offer both, such as Canon, Ricoh and HP. Standalone dedicated scanners make more sense for those who don't need printers. Other than at the low end, though, the scanners on HP's MFPs are on par with its dedicated scanning units, says George Mulhern, the company's senior vice president of enterprise imaging.

"It's virtually the same solution," Mulhern says. "We do have a number of customers who have heavier input process requirements and would rather have a dedicated input device."

Those similarities are less pronounced with very low-end MFPs, where standalone scanners still have more input functionality than do all-in-one systems. Indeed, most agree that if a user's primary intention is scanning, standalone scanners offer better image-capture and processing tools.

For those that prefer MFPs, however, there's another option. One is from software vendor eCopy. The company's software, eCopy ShareScan, enhances the capabilities of the scanners built into MFPs, letting users scan a document, and instructs the application on what file format to create and where to route it.

Besides Canon, the company has recently formed relationships with HP, Ricoh, Sharp and Toshiba, with others in the works. Interestingly, the software is deployed through channel partners.

"The dealer puts together a solution for their customers," says Vickie Malis, vice president of marketing at eCopy. The company last month launched connectors to some popular applications, including EMC Documentum, FileNet and Microsoft SharePoint Services.

No one disputes that MFPs are outselling standalone scanners, but VARs say there are plenty of business opportunities for partners to add the latter to solutions. That's why suppliers of standalone scanners are stepping up their efforts to sell new products to workgroups and departments, and to recruit VARs. Those partners say their efforts have paid off.

Debbie Richards, vice president of sales and marketing at ECS Imaging in Riverside, Calif., says her shipments of scanners have doubled in the past year. "Document scanning is more mainstream," Richards says. "People are more comfortable with having scanners on their desktop as part of their daily process."

Scanners At A Glance

Vendor Model Type/Key Specs Speeds (Simplex/Duplex) Bundled Software Price Canon DR-1210C Desktop flatbed, for light loads up to 300 dpi 12 ppm color/mono (simplex only) Canon CapturePerfect 3.0, Presto BizCard Reader 5, Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard and Nuance OmniPage SE 4 $449 Canon DR-5010C Workgroup, sheet-fed up to 600 dpi, letter/legal 50 ppm/100 ipm (at 200 dpi) Canon Capture Perfect and Adobe Acrobat 7.0 $5,495 Canon DR-2580C Desktop, sheet-fed up to 600 dpi 25 ppm/50 ipm (mono or grayscale); 13 ppm/18ipm (24-bit color) Canon Capture Perfect and Adobe Acrobat 7.0 $1,095 Fujitsu ScanSnap S500 Desktop, 600 dpi 18 ppm/36 ipm ABBYY Finereader automatically converts scanned documents to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or searchable PDFs $495 Fujitsu fi-5120C/5220C Workgroup, up to 600 dpi with ADF (latter has flatbed options) 25 ppm/50 ipm (mono); 30 ppm/60 ipm (color at 150 dpi) Kofax VRS, Adobe Acrobat Standard, ScanAll 21, QuickScan $1,395/$1,995

HP ScanJet 7800 Workgroup flatbed, sheet-fed, with ADF, up to 1,200 dpi, 48-bit color, legal 25 ppm/50 ipm HP Smart Document Scan Software $799 HP ScanJet 8350 Workgroup flatbed, up to 4,800 dpi with 100-page ADF, legal 25 ppm/50 ipm HP Smart Document Scan Software, ScanSoft PaperPort, Adobe Photoshop Elements, I.R.I.S. Readiris Pro OCR, Kofax VRS $1,199 HP ScanJet 8390 Workgroup flatbed, up to 4,800 dpi with 100-page ADF, legal 35 ppm/70 ipm HP Smart Document Scan Software, ScanSoft PaperPort Deluxe, Adobe Photoshop Elements, I.R.I.S. ReadIris Pro OCR, Kofax VRS $1,499 Kodak Scan Station 100 Departmental, 600 dpi with network interface 25 ppm/70 ipm for high-volume functions; includes onboard Intel Celeron processor, 1 GB of RAM, 40-GB hard drive and dual CCD Kodak Capture, ReadIris Pro Corporate Edition $3,000 Visioneer Xerox DocuShare 152 Workgroup, 600 dpi 15 ppm/30 ipm; 9 one-touch preprogrammed destinations ScanSoft PaperPort and OmniPage Pro, ArcSoft Scrapbook Suite, Visioneer OneTouch 4.0, X1 Enterprise Search Client, NewSoft Presto BizCard $695 Visioneer Xerox DocuShare 632 Departmental, up to 600 dpi, legal 35 ppm/70 ipm; 99 one-touch preprogrammed destinations Kofax VRS, ScanSoft PaperPort Professional and OmniPage Pro, QuickScan Pixel Translations $1,995