Copy cos. refine strategies to enlarge bottom lines

"It's part of companies' general plans to focus on services, and companies like Xerox and Canon that can provide services try to configure them (into) ... a considerable part of their offers." -Andrzej Jarosz, IDC The American digital copier maker Xerox is shifting into document management services in high gear this year, expecting them to drive a 25% increase in revenue and profit on its $25 million Polish operations in 2002, according to Olivier Ferraton, the general manager of Xerox Central and Eastern Europe. "This is what we are going to push very strongly for in Poland because in a context where the economy is getting tense and difficult, we believe we cannot go to the market and say that we have the best product and price with this or that feature - the market is not interested anymore," Ferraton said. Some digital copier producers in Poland are increasingly turning to document management services this year in hopes of inflating their bottom lines as copier sales stagnate. Document management - the creation, production, distribution and storage of heavy-duty paperwork - is a fairly new concept in Poland but a necessary one to increase revenue, industry officials said. "In general, the copier market is not growing so it's very difficult to obtain considerable sales growth in those categories," said Andrzej Jarosz, the Warsaw-based research manager of IT market forecaster IDC's Central European operations. "It's part of companies' general plans to focus on services, and companies like Xerox and Canon that can provide services try to configure them (into) ... a considerable part of their offers," he said. Copier sales have remained flat for several years in Poland but document management services stand a good chance here since the law requires the storage of paperwork, such as certain financial documents, Jarosz said. And Poland has so far been immune to the worldwide trend of more and more big companies increasingly pasting reams of documents, such as employee training manuals and customer publications, on their Intranet or Internet sites. "(It's) difficult to judge right now whether keeping or storing documents in electronic form will decrease the demand for the copy, but these digital copiers offer a lot of features that (companies) then want to develop," Jarosz said. Xerox plans copied In Poland, Xerox already provides document management services to Nationale-Nederlanden, Raiffeisen Bank, Citibank, Kredyt Bank, LOT Polish Airlines, Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa, Netia and Avon Polska. Yet despite corporate cutbacks on operations spending worldwide, industry experts said that more large companies in Poland are ready to buy document management services. "We observe from the company point of view that document processing became part of budget planning ... (with) more companies ready to discuss them than in the past," Jarosz said. That observation has also incited Minolta Polska to jump on the document management bandwagon. But the Polish affiliate of the Japanese imaging company is taking a somewhat different approach by planning to sell its own document management system called MicroPress, based on a server that interacts with clusters of machines to produce several big print jobs simultaneously at speeds of about 740 copies per minute. "(Document management systems) appeared some months ago and we had questions about this kind of model and if we (should) start it," said Rafał Jabłoński, Minolta Polska's product solution manager. "It's quite difficult to say what the demand on the market will be."