Workgroup Scanners — Stop Paper Where it Starts

By Penny Lunt

The traditional document imaging model has seen important transactional documents shipped to centralized production scanning sites. This model works well for backfile conversions, for large amounts of consistent documents such as SAT tests or insurance claims, and for records management departments that are centralized anyway.

In the newer, distributed scanning model, anyone can walk up to a workgroup scanner and scan their documents into a small, low-volume machine that’s plugged into departmental or enterprise imaging and document management software. The central site handles the control, archiving and access activities rather than manual scanning of paper. Transportation companies, for example, now scan their bills of lading at remote sites and enter them into the corporate workflow instantly.

InfoTrends Research (www.infotrends-rgi.com) projects that in 1999, 24,000 scanners in the 20-36 ppm category (which they define as departmental) will ship, while in 2004 about 135,000 of these units will ship. That’s a 41% compound annual growth rate. The higher-end scanner category (over 60 ppm) will grow more slowly from 1,200 units in 1999 to 1,750 in 2004, a 7% compound annual growth rate. (This and other information is contained in a new InfoTrends report, “1999 Document Imaging Scanner Forecast.”)

“This category is a sweet spot for the market,” says InfoTrends industry consultant Susan Moyse. “It’s always been a strong performer. These scanners have a nice price/performance ratio and they do more than they used to do at a lower price. These scanners can take advantage of the opportunities of distributed scanning and scanning in general business offices.”

She also points out that as scanner technology becomes affordable to smaller companies, “The middle to low end of the market has a lot of potential of growth.”

Bell & Howell (www.bellhowell.imagingcomponents.com) has already seen a 25-30% increase in sales for its 24-ppm 500 FB this year over last year. “This portion of the market has the greatest potential to grow because it can apply across a variety of environments and companies,” says Todd Radtke, director of technology solutions for Bell & Howell.

One advantage to distributed scanning is that you don’t have to hire dedicated scan operators who may not know what they’re scanning. This can save money and improve quality.

“Within the federal government, they’re finding that to tell somebody ‘you’re going to sit here and scan all day’ is less efficient than to have the person who understands the document do the scanning,” says Randy Blevins, CEO of EDAC (www.edacsystems.com), a VAR that does a lot of government work. “For speed, throughput and accuracy, it’s better to have people scan and fix their own documents than to have one person doing QA on documents from 10 different offices. If somebody only has to scan for a half hour, they will be more accurate than somebody who does it for eight hours straight.”

For its own purposes, EDAC uses 10 ScanPartner 600Cs from Fujitsu (www.fcpa.com) with Kofax (www.kofax.com) Ascent Capture software to scan and email literature to customers. They also scan and OCR documents, and cut and paste sections into proposals to save typing.

The Social Security Administration is spending $23 million on “casual scan stations” put together by EDAC for its paperless office initiative. The stations will be placed at local offices for scanning and archiving 3.4 million documents a year.

Another advantage of scanning locally is that it can save time. The bank that captures check images at the teller station can start processing those payments immediately instead of waiting for physical check delivery at the end of the day. A trucking company that scans a proof of delivery from a remote office or mobile system gets their payment processed faster. An HMO that puts a scanner in a provider’s office could lower internal paper processing expenses while improving response time.

It may also be cheaper to buy several workgroup scanners rather than one behemoth scanner. The smaller scanners don’t have the robustness, the duty cycle or, often, the image quality of the high-end scanners. But if one scanner dies, the other nine can carry on.

Small businesses have started using workgroup scanners. The IS01 from Ricoh (www.ricoh-usa.com/scannner) is used by a lot of small law firms for litigation support, partly because it’s bundled with DocuLex PDF.Capture (www.doculex.com) software that converts images to PDF format.

Real estate firms, trucking companies and leasing firms also buy small workgroup scanners for one-to-ten-user groups at remote locations. Fujitsu has workgroup scanning customers in executive search firms, schools and doctors’ offices, among other areas.

What to Look for in a Workgroup Scanner

Fujitsu is the market-share leader in this category, yet Bell & Howell, Ricoh, Panasonic and Canon all have competitive products. How do you choose?

Image quality: This is determined by the quality of the camera and light source in the scanner as well as its thresholding capabilities. A CCD (charge coupled device) will typically give you better quality than a CIS (contact image sensor). If you require great readability on old, damaged, fine-print, reverse-print, hand-print or very detailed documents, look for a scanner that has high resolution (400 dpi or even 600 dpi) as well as grayscale or color output. Image enhancement features, such as Panasonic’s Image Enhancement software and Bell & Howell’s Image Processing Unit option, can improve image quality on certain types of documents.

On standard business documents, all the scanners in the workgroup category should give you satisfactory images at 200-300 dpi. The best way to measure image quality is to do a live test of the scanner with your documents and view them on a monitor comparable to yours.

Paper handling: Simple mechanisms with a straight paper path, doublefeed detection and retard rollers help prevent jams and doublefeeds. Again, the best way to measure this is in a live test.

Price: Prices are generally in the $3,000 ballpark, with the faster scanners costing more and the 15-ppm Fujitsu ScanPartner 15C a price leader that costs a mere $995. You pretty much pay for speed, so try to be very realistic about how much scanning you need to do in what timeframe.

Speed: If you scan a lot of batches, speed is the key to not spending a lot of time at the scanner. If you only scan one or two documents at a time, speed is less critical. The rated speeds indicate how fast the scanner will process paper in bitonal mode at 200 dpi. If you plan to do a lot of scanning at 400 dpi or in color, the speed will be drastically slower.

Daily duty cycle: This is the number of documents the manufacturer promises you can scan through the machine every day with no problems. In reality, most of these scanners can handle several times more documents per day. However, they’re not designed to run nonstop day after day.

If you’re planning to feed the scanner documents continuously for eight hours or more per day, you need a production scanner. Try to estimate your maximum number of pages to scan each day and make sure the scanner duty cycle surpasses that number.

ADF capacity: The more paper you can throw in the automatic document feeder at a time, the better. Ideally the ADF capacity should be higher than the biggest batch of paper you plan to process. On the other hand, if you have a lot of tricky or damaged documents, having a flatbed on the scanner (available from Bell & Howell, Fujitsu and Ricoh) will be more important to you than a high-capacity ADF.

Ease of use: It’s best to get a system that doesn’t require training. If it’s easy to use, anybody in the organization can walk up and use it. “My experience with customers is they have several people responsible for scanning,” says Radtke at Bell & Howell. “Filing documents is only part of their daily work process.”

Bundled software: If you’re a first-time imaging user experimenting with the technology or part of a small workgroup with modest needs, the software bundled with some of these scanners could be sufficient for you. The Ricoh IS01 ships with DocuLex PDF.Capture software for scanning and saving images as text-searchable PDF files. The Fujitsu ScanPartner 93GX is bundled with Eastman Software’s (www.eastmansoftware.com) Imaging for Windows Professional, which provides basic scanning and workflow features. Other scanners come with rudimentary scan and view utilities. The Fujitsu ScanPartner 600C comes with the Eastman software as well as Adobe Acrobat, PageMill and a light version of Photoshop.

If you’re moving digital documents across an enterprise with remote scanning feeding into a central archive, then the bundled software doesn’t matter to you. You need to buy a full-blown capture software system with remote capabilities, such as Kofax’s Ascent Capture or InputAccel from Input Software (www.inputsw.com).

Service/warranty: A one-year warranty is the norm. Fujitsu, Bell & Howell and Ricoh provide on-site repair with replacement if the technician can’t fix the problem. Canon offers on-site service through a third-party provider, Access Services (a division of Scan-Optics). Panasonic will ship you a new scanner within 24 hours of failure.

As always, it’s helpful to kick the tires and talk to other users before buying.