Maegan LujanThe technology industry is evolving at unparalleled rates; businesses are going digital overnight in response to customer demands and the recent COVID-19 impact. The role I play in this reactive evolution is to bridge the gap as these changes occur and ensure success ensures both the short- and long-term.
My team’s focus at Toshiba is to keep ahead of the curve with our offerings, align our focus with market trends, and adapt rapidly to conditions such as these. Our underlying goal is to introduce products and services that provide our distribution channel with a source of differentiation in their marketplace.
To support the next generation of customers, our portfolio team works hard to curate a best-in-class portfolio, partner with industry-leading technology providers, and optimize internal processes to provide a frictionless experience.
This enables our resellers to grow revenue, expand into new markets, and create new ongoing and recurring services. We are one of the global technology brands who are inventing the future of the workplace, and “future-proofing” our product portfolio has been a long-time mission for my team.
Understanding how technological changes affect Toshiba as a company, helps me to understand what our customers need. If we’re successful internally, we can help make you successful externally. We are using this knowledge to shape our offerings and connect with our customers through product strategy.
How can technology help my employees be more productive?
With organizations and employees all over the world being virtualized to work from home, I’m being asked the same question repeatedly: how can I utilize technology to stay productive in a disbursed, virtual environment?
From leaders to individual contributors, I’m seeing a common theme that is causing them concern.
- Their businesses aren’t set up for remote work.
- They have paper driven processes, and can’t access the files.
- They don’t know how to access company data from home, or how to keep it safe while accessing it from home.
- They don’t have a home input/output device that works with IT requirements.
I’m going to break the virtual and digital office foundation out into three sections below to help you better understand the vital role technology can play in your organization.
Each section will offer solutions to enable the continuity of business operations and provide insights into getting the most out of your virtualized workforce.
Remote office productivity
All employees, regardless of their location, need uninterrupted access to business documents.
However, we’re experiencing the reality that it’s impossible to jump to a digital-only platform overnight; hard copy materials are still in play for nearly EVERY business.
Essential businesses like insurance and healthcare claim processing companies, need to process patient information now even more than before COVID-19. So how can technology help?
- By creating a virtualized office infrastructure using input/output devices (printers & scanners) that enable workflows similar to your office.
- They are moving to a more virtually centralized workplace versus brick and mortar, which will increase remote productivity and allow employees to stay within social distancing guidelines.
Paper-to-digital transformation
Let’s talk about digitization, your starting point. Most people confuse this with “paperless,” which is a good description but isn’t wholly accurate. A paper-to-digital transformation is all about unlocking the data — not going paperless.
Digitization is an integral part of the digital reinvention strategy that many businesses have undergone to keep up with changing times. With the impact of a pandemic, paper dependency is making the transition more challenging than before.
Not only are there still vast amounts of paper documents that need to be converted into business-critical information, but there is also an influx of digital documents coming to employees from multiple sources in various formats causing data chaos.
The goal with digitization is to move ALL information into a digital format, so it can be easily indexed, searched, accessed, shared, secured, auditable, and archived. Thus, removing the dependency on physical data and expanding to high digital availability.
Digitization drives efficiency! The goal is cutting unnecessary costs from the bottom line, while recognizing similar outputs with fewer resources.
In this step, you want to digitally archive ALL of your documents for easy access, making them available anywhere at any time.
Here’s what it means for your business:
- Locating data is easier.
- Access to secure data can be regulated and monitored.
- Business processes can be completed anywhere from any device.
- Compliance, whether that equates to HIPAA, GDPR, Sarbanes-Oxley, or merely internal audit prep, will be a much simpler process.
Digital Workflow Automation
This last part, and a popular favorite, streamlines and improves document processes, by distributing information across the organization using secure software solutions. This can be done with MFPs, scanners, and mobile devices functioning as the “digital-on–ramp” into any cloud or virtually hosted platform.
What’s at stake here, and what starts to REALLY move the meter for our customers, is workflow automation.
By streamlining and improving document processing across the organization, you drive productivity – your organization’s ability to do MORE work with the SAME resources.
It will also enable you to search, retrieve, manage securely, and archive information, which empowers you to:
- Turn business rules into real action
- Configure workflows for adaptive work environment
- Resolve process bottlenecks
- Optimize staff for exceptions
- And Improve customer service.
These are trying times for all of us, but we have a chance to evoke positive changes that will forever transform how business is conducted. Are you up for the challenge?
P.S. Want to learn more?
Check out the latest webinar I hosted with Toshiba Business addressing some of the unique challenges and pressures facing businesses as a result of today’s remote workforce.
We walk through how companies like Toshiba are uniquely positioned to support the demands of a remotely dispersed workforce through on-premises and cloud solutions that bridge the gap from the home office to corporate headquarters.
You can view the webinar, Socially Distant, but Fully Connected, HERE
