Konica Minolta bizhub 8031 Color Imaging System At Shepherd, Kaplan & Acuña, color and black & white output is crisper and better than with their former devices – and the ROI is easy to see. The Client Shepherd, Kaplan & Acuña The Situation This six-person, Boston-based registered investment advisory firm provides financial advice and wealth management to high net worth individuals, trusts, foundations and endowments, and consults to corporations with regard to their pension plans. With professional-quality communications being a necessity in dealing with their clients, the firm has a history of using color to enhance their reports, proposals, presentations and other types of external documents. In a small office such as this, the correct document imaging system has the potential to increase productivity, save costs and improve the quality of external communications. So, when Shepherd, Kaplan & Acuña decided to upgrade to a system that could handle their growing color needs, they needed an imaging system and accompanying software to meet their requirements and deliver a return on their investment. The Challenge Like many small offices, Shepherd, Kaplan & Acuña had been handling its color production using a combination of outsourcing to vendors such as Copy Cop or Staples, and printing internally on a slow, Hewlett-Packard color laser printer. Popularized a decade ago by Hewlett-Packard, this “hybrid” approach provided companies with an effective way to incorporate small volumes of color into their business. However, as color printing has reached the point where it has become a necessity in order for businesses to remain competitive, this approach has become both outdated, costly and time consuming. Today’s per-page costs of ink jet and laser printers approach $.50–$.75 and outsourced color printing and copying can run upwards of $1–$1.50 per page. Over the last few years, leading vendors have unveiled digital color printing technology that offers higher image quality, faster speeds and lower costs than ink jet and laser technology. With per-page costs now nearing $.10 and production speeds and finishing functionality on par with black & white devices, businesses have a number of options. Faced with these challenges, Shepherd, Kaplan & Acuña began the process of determining how best to address the need for increased color production. The Solution Following a vendor review, including Konica Minolta, Ricoh, Canon and Kyocera Mita, the company purchased a 31 page-per-minute (ppm) digital color and black & white multifunctional device – the Konica Minolta bizhub 8031 Color Imaging System, designed to bring the advantages of high speed, high productivity and high image quality to the creation of business documents within office environments. The 8031 also comes with standard scan-to-FTP capabilities, allowing simple electronic archiving, an important and ongoing task in their business. And by converting their documents to PDF files stored on the company hard drive, Shepherd Kaplan & Acuña is able to move archived hard copies of documents off-site and simply call up the saved electronic version of an archived document if it is needed. To further assist the firm with their workflow and document management – including the production of full-color reports and projects for their high-profile clients – John McBride of Conway Office Products, a Konica Minolta dealer based in Nashua, NH, recommended that they implement ePware, a low-cost software application from Konica Minolta that allows users to organize electronic files from multiple applications by converting them into PDF files. Before they chose to implement ePware, Shepherd Kaplan & Acuña had to individually print each document and then manually collate them before having them bound together as a presentation – an incredibly time-consuming process. Now, the staff can take the same proposal, with the same number of sources, and line up the presentation to be printed in order for binding in a single operation. Furthermore, they no longer need to produce and store an extra copy of the presentation, as they are able to save it electronically for their records and future reproduction. The Results Shepherd, Kaplan & Acuña has been using the Konica Minolta bizhub 8031 and ePware since April 2003 and has seen an immediate return on the investment in both the hardware and software. Color and black & white output is crisper and better than with their former devices, and as opposed to ink jet and laser color printing, they are able to count on the output being consistent from print-to-print. In addition, by reducing the time of production, the use of the Konica Minolta bizhub 8031 and ePware has given Shepherd, Kaplan & Acuña the ability to produce more pages for more clients and generate new leads on an ongoing basis due to an increased ability to produce proposals. And, as those leads turn into new business, the Konica Minolta bizhub 8031’s capabilities will allow the firm to meet those new client demands. Justifying a spending increase in a business function such as document management is not always easy. While there are many ways to calculate ROI, a close look at per page costs, the quality of your documents, productivity levels, and time savings will yield the answer. But there is no doubt that dollars count as well. Notes David Kaplan, a partner at Shepherd, Kaplan & Acuña: “our ROI is that we are able to better utilize time that would have been otherwise spent waiting on a slower solution.” And as the old adage says, time equals money.

“Our ROI is that we are able to better utilize time that would have been otherwise spent waiting on a slower solution.” And as the old adage says, time equals money." David Kaplan, Partner, Shepherd, Kaplan & Acuña