Sheetfed And Flatbed Scanners Fit Desktop Distribution
Fujitsu's Director of Product Marketing Scott Francis
describes product offerings that accommodate varying versions
of a decentralized approach to document capture.
By Tom von Gunden
About a year and a half ago, I had one of those "Eureka" moments; in this case, regarding distributed capture. At the time, I was covering the story of the United States Army Recruiting Command's deployment of dozens of desktop scanners. Those small-footprint devices had been scattered across the main recruiting facility, landing on the workstations of the organization's application-processing counselors. At those workstations, counselors were collecting and scanning the various qualifying documents each recruit brought in for processing.
The light bulb went on as I began to envision the broadened range of employees that were now being charged with doing document imaging. And, I began to envision myself handling similar document-imaging tasks. As would the recruiting counselors, I consider myself to be a trained professional but hardly a trained scanning professional. My core skills, like theirs, had been pointed, and would continue to be pointed, toward other tasks. But, that's no reason to panic, I soon concluded. Low-volume scanners have become increasingly easy to use, and even low-end imaging software provides good image quality. So, I saw in the military rollout clear indicators that lots of organizations would eventually have lots of workers scanning at their desktops.
The particular scanners used by the Army Recruiting Command at the time I covered the story were from Fujitsu Computer Products of America. Fujitsu's line of scanners includes several sheetfed and flatbed machines designed with small enough footprints to accommodate desktop, workgroup, and departmental users running low-volume to mid-volume scanning operations. I recently spoke with Director of Product Marketing Scott Francis about distributed capture. Included in that conversation was a detailed look at Fujitsu's product line, particularly as it targets customers looking to supplement or perhaps even move away from centralized production scanning.
Tom: Which trends have been driving and are likely to continue driving decentralized scanning rollouts?
Scott: One emerging trend is compliance. Even private companies are beginning to target Sarbanes Oxley compliance because their banks are requiring it. The Patriot Act is another key compliance-based driver. It's forcing more organizations to capture such documents as ID cards, passports, and application forms.
At the end of January 2005, we released a new flatbed product with a very small footprint, the fi-60F. It measures only 1.6 by 9.2 by 5.7 inches and is specifically designed to help customers capture ID information on driver's licenses, credit cards, passports, photographs, and so on. The scanner is not much bigger than the scan area, which allows for images up to 5.83 by 4.13 inches.
Our fi-4120C2 sheetfed scanner is also able to handle ID cards. We have a lot of customers in healthcare that use that scanner during the admission process. They use it to capture admission forms, driver's licenses, and insurance cards.
Other than the card scanning capabilities, are there other features that make a decentralized deployment attractive?
Well, scanners have come down dramatically in price while maintaining high-end features. Some high-end features that are making their way to lower-priced scanners in the workgroup or departmental categories are duplex scanning, color, deskew, black background, imprinting, document doublefeed detection, and Kofax' VRS [Virtual ReScan] software.
Speaking of software, another key driver has been the use of the Internet for moving electronic images. A number of imaging software solutions are Web-based, and that makes distributed scanning much more viable. For example, Kofax offers the Ascent Capture Internet Server.
When scanning gets pushed out across an organization — across multiple departments and workstations, perhaps even multiple locations — lots of people, few of whom would be considered imaging experts, are going to be tasked with document scanning. How does this reality influence the way Fujitsu thinks about distributed scanning?
Once you get to the front office where the paper is created, several factors become more important: size, noise, and ease-of-use. The footprint has to be small. And, the scanner has to be quiet. High-end production scanners aren't quiet. That's OK because they're typically tucked away in a back office or centralized mailroom. But, it's not OK in the front office, where employees are often on the phone or meeting with customers. In prominent locations like those, excessive machine noise is likely to be distracting and annoying.
Also, ease-of-use is key. In a centralized production environment, you're going to have scanner experts that have learned how to leverage all the image enhancement and document-feeding capabilities in the scanner. But, in the front office or distributed environment, you have regular office employees doing scanning in addition to their regular office duties.
The value of ease-of-use becomes most obvious when the scanner does a good job of paper handling. Because the user isn't going to be as trained or efficient as a centralized operator, the scanner has to be able to feed a wide variety of documents without the user necessarily prepping them perfectly.
You've mentioned a couple of specific products. Tell us about the range of Fujitsu scanner products in terms of how they might be used in distributed environments. I'm guessing some are more likely than others to be candidates for decentralized deployments.
In some organizations, moving to a distributed scanning model involves taking some of the high-volume scanning work out of a centralized production environment and having it completed by workgroups and departments. For a customer that has been using high-end production scanners operating at, say, 150 to 200 pages per minute, a shift to distributed scanning could mean deploying some of our fi-5650 and fi-5750 scanners. These are midvolume scanners that can handle up to 57 pages per minute and up to 8,000 pages per day. Their suggested list prices are $5,995 and $8,995, respectively. The fi-5650 is fast, and it has high-end features. But, the footprint is still small because the device is sheetfed only. Its relative compactness makes it particularly attractive for distributed environments.
But, in other organizations, the shift to decentralized or distributed scanning would actually involve deploying multiple workgroup or departmental models. We have three sheetfed scanners that are well suited for distributed environments: the fi-5110C, with speeds of up to 15 pages per minute; the fi-4120C2, which scans at up to 25 pages per minute; and the fi-4530C, which handles up to 35 pages per minute and also offers ultrasonic doublefeed detection.
We also have two lower-priced ADF (automatic document feeder)-equipped flatbed scanners that would work well: the fi-4010CU and the fi-4220C2. The fi-4010CU would be ideal for cost-conscious organizations that want to deploy low-end scanners across lots and lots of desktops. It scans up to 12 pages per minute and lists for only $695.
The fi-4220C2 is particularly attractive for organizations that have traditionally used a flatbed scanner as a rescan station in a centralized scanning environment. In a distributed model, there usually isn't budget or physical space to have a secondary station for handling exceptions and rescans. The fi-4220C2 gives customers the option of having both sheetfed and flatbed capabilities at a single station on one machine. Like the sheetfed-only fi-4120C2, the fi-4220C2 handles up to 25 pages per minute and ships standard with VRS image enhancement software.
You mentioned the fi-5110C. That's a new scanner offering, isn't it?
Yes, it's the latest member of our workgroup scanner family. It's essentially a smaller version of our fi-4120C2, and it can scan up to 15 pages per minute. With an overall footprint 20% smaller than that of the fi-4120C2, the fi-5110C can easily fit into front office spaces, such as pharmacy counters and hospital admissions desks. Unlike the fi-4120C2, the fi-5110C does not come outfitted with either of the Kofax software packages, VRS or Capio. But, that's intentional. We wanted a low-cost model that allows our resellers to add value by deploying the software they're used to installing. The fi-5110C does come with our standard TWAIN utilities and Adobe Acrobat 6.0. Like all of our workgroup scanners, the fi-5110C also has infrared document doublefeed detection capabilities.
Tom von Gunden is chief editor of Data Storage Connection and ECM Connection