As technology advances and the global economy becomes more accessible, North American businesses must continually strive to increase their productivity levels. The majority of Canadians that work full time log 40 to 50 hours per week, which is just about the maximum you can have employees working without running into burnout issues.

With this in mind, as a manager or a business owner, you should constantly be analyzing every aspect of your operations to find ways to increase the productivity of your team. An often overlooked area is your office printer. The printer, or printers in your organization are likely used by almost every employee, with a large portion of your data flowing through this specific piece of office technology.    

A modern office printer can increase the productivity of a team or business by:

• Allowing your team to search within scanned documents
• Enabling the ability to print from mobile devices
• Eliminating paper copy redundancies
• Reducing training through user friendly touch screens and operating systems

Previously, when a document was scanned and turned into a file such as a pdf., it’s searchability was dependant on the file name and metadata tagging. These methods of identification can return poor results to employees searching for the files that did not name the files in question. Creating long file names and metadata is also extremely time consuming.

Recent technology has produced printers and printer solutions that turn the text in documents into searchable data. You may have heard this referred to as optical character recognition, or OCR for short.

A simple example could be witnessed at a law firm that owns a document named “Dr.Browns Case”. A new employee needs this file but they only know the name of the lawyers and the judge involved, not the client. Previously this employee would have to spend countless minutes or hours searching the law firm’s database, or track down fellow employees who may know the location of the document. Not very efficent!

Ask your TOPS representative how your can make all the content within your scanned documents searchable!

Mobile Printing

In some organizations, a large portion of business is conducted on mobile devices. Emails, presentations and social media are all orchestrated on smartphones and tablets in the modern business environment. If one of your employees has to take the time to send a document or powerpoint from their device to a stationary desktop or laptop in order to print it, valuable time is lost.

All of your printers and copiers need to be updated to be mobile friendly- if you are dealing with old technology that does support your employees devices, your productivity is suffering.

If you need help getting your printer connected to your network, we can help with that too!

Less Paper

It wasn’t long ago that all documents in an organization were displayed and shared with only paper documents. Even today, the the average office worker spends about 45% of their time managing documents- a massive opportunity to increase productivity. If you have a powerful printer that has scanning functions, your organization can drastically decrease the amount of paper that is being utilized in your processes.

A great example is a simple invoice. In an unproductive, paper laden organization, this document would be printed at least 3 times. Once for filing, once for your payments department and once for the client. This is a waste of paper, time and leaves the possibility that a physical copy of an invoice will be lost in transition. This could all be avoided by scanning invoices when they are created, storing and sharing these devices via your network where they can easily be found at anytime.  

User Friendly Devices

Do you remember the days when you almost needed a full training course to understand all the functions of a printer, scanner or fax machine? The modern machines supplied by our partner companies are now just as intuitive as a smartphone or an app. A simple operating system ensures that any employee in your organization can easily and quickly use your printer system. There should be no guessing or common errors throughout the printing process. Do you often have to answer questions about your printer, or see employees staring down at the device hoping for an answer. A simple hardware update instantly fixes this issue!

Whether you desire to increase the productivity of your business, or you want to ensure that all your data and documents are secure, TOPS have you covered. We offer individual printing solutions, or complete, full service programs that provide your team with 24/7 support and customer service.

Ready to take your business to the next level? Call our team today!