Returning to Work and Your Copier

Everyone is scrambling to get people back in their office and to do so, it needs to be in a safe and sanitary way.

The events of the last three months have changed our thinking around what were simple everyday processes that we may not have put too much thought into in the past.

Things as simple as opening a door now spur thoughts of contaminants and germs, not to mention pumping gas, or using a serving utensil at a buffet. Virtually any hard surface with community contact needs to be thought about now, what we did 3 months ago without thought are now being looked at differently.

One thing that I see as being overlooked is copying and scanning. Multifunction Printers have replaced single-function copiers, printers, scanners, and fax machines in the office. They are generally strategically placed to allow workgroups access to a more efficient higher-power multifunction unit that runs more efficiently……………………but, everyone in that workgroup touches it.

Solutions do exist and have for some time.

There have been voice control/remote control capabilities built into copiers or available through add-on applications for quite some time. Some of these technologies have come and gone based on the lack of demand for such things.

Voice control, for instance, was available on machines going back to 2009. Not widely but it was there. It was also a widely circulated April Fools joke in April of 2010. People were printing voice control instructions for equipment that didn’t have voice control as a prank. It was effective and lead to people yelling commands at the copier.

Fast forward to today. Sharp released the first copier that works with “Alexa for Business” in 2018. Up until about three months ago, it was cool, but not mission-critical. When March saw the world change, an unprecedented focus on community hard surface contact happened.

As we see businesses having people disinfect community accessible hard surfaces after every use to protect employees and customers alike, the conversation SHOULD begin as to how we have people avoid contact with those surfaces altogether.

With Sharp, that is Alexa for business. “Alexa, make me 5 copies, duplexed, and stapled in full color.” “Alexa, scan these documents to my email.” I touch only my originals. No need to touch the device itself and no reason for me or someone else to disinfect.

With Kyocera, that is the MyPanel Application. MyPanel allows you to remote control the machine with your mobile device. Same scenario. Place your originals in the doc feed and input all the necessary settings and initiate the job on a mobile device. No community hard surface contact.
Whether you want to refer to it as touchless operation, voice control, or remote control the bottom line is you can make copies and scan documents without touching a community hard surface.

If this is something you are interested in, please contact us. You may already have it and not even know!