February 26, 2015 – Document management bureaus are continually under pressure to offer cost competitive and tailored services for customers. Speed of response is key especially as more requests for colour and high resolution scanning are now being made for specific jobs such as digitising building plans and medical records.
To meet these operational needs, KGS Associates, a long established and respected document management bureau with facilities in the UK and the Czech Republic, announces it is changing its whole scanner estate and standardising on mid and high volume production scanners from Kodak Alaris. KODAK i4600 Plus and i5000 Series Scanners will be deployed throughout the business.
KGS offers a full range of digital archiving and BPO services currently processing about 3 million images per month for a range of clients in the NHS, local and central government and various police forces around the UK.
The switch from its existing scanner supplier is for various reasons. First, KODAK Production Scanners do not slow down when operating at 300 dpi in colour. This maximizes operator productivity and ensures customer service level agreements are met. The i4600 Plus scanners process 120 pages per minute (ppm) with the i5000 series rated at up to 170 ppm in dual stream with all image processing features switched on.
Second, service and support offered by Kodak Alaris is significantly better. Glen Moffat, KGS’ production director explains, “Since the days of microfilm, the quality of Kodak Alaris’ service offering hasn’t changed. They’ve always had friendly and knowledgeable engineers. This means that the majority of problems are fixed straight away with parts arriving next day if they aren’t. It’s completely polar to our experience with our other vendor where we just had too much down time as service was contracted out to third party engineers who weren’t scanner specialists.”
The impact of this was that KGS staff ended up having to learn how to strip down its [old] scanners to repair them. The business would also over stock by buying additional production scanners to ensure it could always ‘hot swap’ a machine if there was an issue. This wasted staff time and working capital.
Third, day-to-day scanner consumable costs are much cheaper which reduces running costs. Moffat explains, “Even though we were initially buying hardware at a low price, every three years, we were spending £12,000 just on rubber rollers to maintain the scanner fleet. Contrast that with Kodak Alaris where the like for like bill is about £250. It’s a staggering difference with the money saved going straight to our bottom line.”
Fourth, KGS uses KOFAX EXPRESS as its corporate capture software platform and historically selected other scanner equipment to ensure compatibility. Given that the i4600 Plus and i5000 Series Scanners now come with drivers to support KOFAX, it has opened up the KODAK range of scanners to KGS. This has given the directors of the company the opportunity to review hardware deployed. They have decided that Kodak Alaris is a better fit for the business.
Steve Saywell, KGS’ technical sales director, says, “Kodak Alaris sells 120 ppm plus scanners for a fair price which offer KOFAX support plus consumables which are cost effective, backed up with maintenance contracts which are the best in the business. Add that all up and that’s the reason for our wholesale change.“
Other bureaus trust in KGS
Given the founders of KGS have over 35 years’ experience in document capture and an enviable reputation, the company is often asked to support other bureaus when they need additional processing capacity on customer projects. Moffat says, “People trust us to deliver for them and we pride ourselves on taking on jobs which are unusual or tough. In the past, for example, we’ve dealt with scanning Christmas cards or documentation contaminated by asbestos. Delivering requires operational know-how, but it needs scanners which perform well which is why Kodak Alaris is an excellent fit. ”
Given its expertise, KGS is also becoming a Kodak Alaris reseller, selling scanners to other bureaus and large end-user organisations.
Neil Murphy, Kodak Alaris’ UK sales manager says, “The KGS deal is an excellent example of looking at total cost of ownership when it comes to scanner selection. It’s no good just getting a good deal on purchase price. One has to look at running costs, reliability and the quality of image to get the best fit which is where our scanner solutions score so well.”
