The way we work has changed so significantly, and so to has what we need from our print devices. 10 years ago, a printer was required only to produce physical copies of documents. That need hasn’t gone away. But to meet today’s hybrid working styles, a printer needs to be a hub for both print and digital workflows. That means being the site not just where digital becomes print, but where print transforms into digital. It means being connected to our workplace apps to plug documents straight into workflows. And it means offering security for our most sensitive information.

While 2020 has caused a major rise in remote working, research suggests that the future of work isn’t binary. 64%¹ of employees report they would like to spend at least part of the time working at an office or location outside of their home. Organisations therefore need to invest in technology that supports a new working style, one which enables employees to work effectively across multiple locations.

At Canon we’re always closely observing the evolving workspace and how it impacts our customers’ needs. That’s why we’ve designed an ecosystem of technology, Digital Transformation Services (DTS) which bring together our leading hardware and software into an integrated technology ecosystem, designed to support your transformation journey. This offering combines our leading hardware with Managed Print Services and Workspace Collaboration solutions, to help you gain transparency and control over the entire document lifecycle.

Hardware is at the heart of our DTS offering. The devices we create have long since stopped being just ‘printers’ and have been elevated from their traditional role to support with transformation by providing the connectivity and workflow enablement needed for today’s hybrid working environments. Building on the award-winning imageRUNNER ADVANCE DX Series, our latest model, the imageRUNNER ADVANCE DX C5800 Series continues to support your journey to digitisation through connectivity.

The imageRUNNER ADVANCE DX C5800 Series offers state of the art scanning technology to help employees more easily digitise information and make it easily accessible to those who need it – ensuring business continuity even with a distributed workforce. The devices can efficiently scan mixed media at up to 270ipm. Using intelligent Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and machine leaning¹, the devices can be taught to effectively identify and categorise your typical company documents, allowing it to provide automatic recommendations for saving destinations based on rules set by the user.

Supporting transformation means more than just digitisation – it also means better supporting digital workflows. Once extracted, the imageRUNNER ADVANCE DX C5800 Series, can automatically input information into your workflow software, such as SAP Concur, saving your employees valuable time on manual data entry, as well as ensuring that data entered is accurate. Meanwhile, our devices offer seamless integration with our uniFLOW Online software, which makes it easier than ever to print and scan documents straight to your cloud destinations including Dropbox and OneDrive.

However, while accessibility is crucial for successful remote working, it must be balanced with security. As a connected device, a cloud-enabled printer needs to offer robust protections to ensure that it isn’t vulnerable to attack or accidental breach, putting information into the wrong hands. Though companies are under pressure to adapt fast and implement necessary technology as soon as possible, it’s important that speed never comes at the expense of security.

Our technology ecosystem ensures your documents are protected wherever they are in the workflow. While all of our devices are built to be secure by design, a number of high spec features in new devices including the imageRUNNER ADVANCE DX C5800 Series also help to keep your data safe. No matter where your device is located, documents sent to print can only be released from a secure print queue once an identity card is presented. Meanwhile, scanning technology can identify secure file types, such as financial information and apply automatic security protection including encryption of the data being transferred. The information is then scanned to a secure file location where access rules can be applied; for example, sensitive HR information is protected from being accessed by employees.

We understand that our customer needs are changing rapidly. We want to equip you with the tools you need to be ready for the new normal. As we move towards hybrid ways of working it will be increasingly important to have hardware in place which can step up to the challenge, offering the connectivity, security and workflow technology to help your teams work effectively.

Find out how the imageRUNNER ADVANCE DX C5800 Series can support your workspace transformation goals.