The “paperless office” has long been held up as a goal for businesses large and small, but few have come even close. The average office worker, in fact, still generates roughly two pounds of paper waste every day, according to the U.S. EPA.
Aiming to help cut a few more of the ties that bind businesses to paper, Xerox on Tuesday unveiled a raft of new automation services and mobile apps for enterprise users.
Xerox’s Workflow Automation Solution for Supply Chain Optimization tool, for example, targets retailers with a new way to digitize, centralize, automate and govern the manual steps involved in the product life cycle. Using the Datawatch Managed Analytics Platform, the new offering can reduce labor and printing costs, Xerox says, as well as simplify inventory and invoice reconciliation and improve fill rates by syncing data and applying automated analytics at the store level.
Several new workflow-automation offerings, meanwhile, focus on financial services, healthcare and human resources with tools for loan-application processing, health records information management and employee onboarding, respectively.
Xerox’s Digital Alternatives service is now available in the cloud with additional analytics, it announced, while analytics included in its Secure Print Manager Suite offer insight into who is printing what, when and where along with how much.
Finally, five new apps for mobile printing are designed to help employees create, share and process information without servers, middleware or IT support. The Xerox Mobile Link App, for example, lets users create personalized, one-touch workflows on their mobile device to remotely control a Xerox printer and transmit documents to the cloud, fax, email or other destinations.
Other apps focus on cloud printing and faxing as well as accessibility for visually impaired users.
