On Tuesday, it was announced that Brecher, Wyner, Simons & Bolan, LLP, had selected the Canon and eCopy Suite of products to convert its paper into easily accessible, electronic information. The release described a document workflow that was in peril - copying, filing, finding, re-copying, re-filing etc. Today the law firm is saving a significant amount of time and money with their new eCopy and Canon workflow. Another eCopy customer we spoke with has eliminated nearly 3,000 overnight courier packages per year by implementing an eCopy workflow in a single department.

Paper-based processes are, by their very nature, time-consuming, manual and tend to rely on serial, rather than parallel, routing and review methods. Additionally, paper-based processes incur expenses as paper is moved around, whether by fax, postal mail, overnight courier, or even being transported by mail center staff within a corporate campus.

So solutions from eCopy is a no-brainer, right? Mr. Ed Schmid, President & CEO of eCopy, is a long proponent of not only bridging paper and digital, but placing those capabilities into the hands of the masses, so to speak. Our talk with Mr. Schmid highlights what’s happening in the marketplace to digitally enable the workplace, creating a seamless transition between those legacy, paper-based processes and today’s emerging digital workflows.

WTT: Mr. Schmid, you have been in the document imaging industry for a long time. Perhaps you could provide us with some highlights of your background and how that led you to found eCopy.

Mr. Ed Schmid: In the early 80s, I was working at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) as Program Manager for CDROM. We developed the first commercial CD-ROM drive, working with Philips and Sony on formats for putting data on CD Audio disks. One of the uses of CD-ROMs that the industry was exploring was the storage of document images. This led me to look into the concept of document imaging systems. FileNet was an early innovator here, but their system was not integrated with standard network computing environments. At DEC, we worked with Kodak on developing KIMS (Kodak Image Management Systems), which ran in a standard DEC VMS network environment. Both FileNet and KIMS were large and expensive and I was interested in making the technology affordable to a larger customer base, so I joined LaserData in 1988.

LaserData offered the industry’s first PC based document imaging systems. In three years we grew the company from $4 million to $16 million, but we were still only addressing a relatively small user base. In 1992, I co-founded Simplify Development Corporation, with the goal of using document imaging technology to distribute paper based documents over computer networks. Since scanners were relatively expensive at that time, we developed ShareScan as a way to share a scanner on a network. It was a great idea, but we hit the market before all the pieces were in place. Our product was based on MS-Windows and LAN oriented e-mail systems. Our target market, large corporations, organizations and government agencies, were still using terminal/text-based e-mail. We, also, found that scanners were not viewed as "standard" office peripherals. We survived those early years by OEMing our products and selling it as a front end to network fax servers.


WTT: Many of our readers may not be familiar with eCopy, Let’s briefly overview the company history, mission and product set.

Mr. Ed Schmid: The company was incorporated in 1992 and we introduced our first products in 1993. It turned out that our products were a little ahead of the market and we grew slowly by licensing our patent and technology to others. In 1995, eCopy recognized two key developments that would create the market we first envisioned (1) the Internet and (2) digital copiers.

We made a "bet your company" decision to focus all our efforts on the emerging digital copier market. Those early years were slow because the office equipment channel we sold through did not see the value of selling software. Our product line consisted of a network scanning application, ShareScan and a desktop document imaging application called MailRoom (now marketed as eCopy Desktop). We quickly learned that the office equipment dealer channel understood how to sell a "box" that did something. So in 1999, we integrated ShareScan with a touch panel based PC that just plugged into the digital copier and the network. This model has worked extremely well for eCopy, and over the last three years we have tripled our revenues as paper document distribution has become a mainstream application.


WTT: eCopy has taken an interesting approach by leveraging this technology to change the way people work. Can you give us an example of how a mid-sized company might implement an eCopy ScanStation and what benefits they might expect to see when employees embrace the solution?

Mr. Ed Schmid: Business runs on communication. We help companies save money and time when communicating paper-based information inside and outside their organizations. Our products eliminate fax charges and improve document readability, eliminate overnight letter costs, and improve speed of delivery. On our Website, we have examples of companies, like Porter Cable, who have shown a payback on the eCopy product in less than four months. Companies that use our products save money and have a competitive edge because information flows more rapidly.


WTT: This seems like a no-brainer; what do you see as the biggest barriers to implementation?

Mr. Ed Schmid: Technology evolves rapidly, but what is hard to change are people’s habits. So our greatest inhibitor to higher sales is to get people to use our products. Once they use them, the benefits become obvious.


WTT: What actions are you taking to help the channel overcome those barriers?

Mr. Ed Schmid: This is a product that has to "be seen" to be sold. Therefore, we have implemented programs to get demo systems into all showrooms, we have run programs to train the Sales Reps on how to give a good demo and we encourage Dealers to place units in trial installations.


WTT: Many of the copier manufacturers, including Canon, Ricoh and Konica, are now starting to embed their own "scan-to-file" or "scan-to-email" solutions in the base copier configuration. How do you see this trend impacting eCopy’s future?

Mr. Ed Schmid: From a packaging standpoint, the customer prefers an embedded solution. However, what they buy is functionality. Our architecture, which is based on a standard PC platform enables us to integrate better with enterprise applications and will continue to give us a functionality advantage. In the long run, remember, eCopy’s core competence is in software and as long as the copier manufacturers provide third party access to their embedded touch panel, our capability can be delivered there as well.


WTT: Scan-to-file and scan-to-email are pretty straightforward. eCopy’s solutions are clearly a convenient bridge between the paper and digital worlds, and you have articulated the benefits well. Let’s spend a little time, though, talking about how you interface with document management systems. First, what document management systems do you currently support and what would be the normal workflow associated with loading documents into a document management system via eCopy?

Mr. Ed Schmid: eCopy has supported integration with Document Management Systems since 1994. Until recently, this integration was from eCopy Desktop using ODMA (Open Document Management Application Programming Interface). Since many of our early customers used eCopy Desktop to view incoming faxes from network fax servers, eCopy was primarily used to save copies of faxes to Document Management Systems (DMS).

All the leading Document Management Systems support ODMA. From eCopy Desktop, we support IBM/Lotus Domino.Doc, iManage, Open Text and Hummingbird DOCS Open. To save documents to a DMS, one scans from the digital copier using ShareScan’s "Scan to Desktop" function. Scanned documents are opened from the user’s personal "Scan Inbox" into eCopy Desktop. Selecting "Save" from the "File" menu brings up the indexing form of the DMS.

Recently, we introduced the next product in a series of what we call Connectors that enable a user to save scanned documents directly from the digital copier to a DMS. The eCopy Domino.Doc Connector was introduced in January of 2002 for IBM/Lotus Domino.Doc. We will be introducing additional Connectors in the next six months. Other vendors are beginning to claim similar capability, but what has always distinguished eCopy’s implementation is that it requires no lists to be loaded and maintained at individual digital copiers for user authentication. This is a huge selling point with the IT organization since it means zero administration and much lower total cost of ownership.


WTT: How easy is it to support new document management solutions, and how do you approach the task of adding those to your portfolio of connectors?

Mr. Ed Schmid: One of the key strengths in our product offerings is our ability to integrate with all of today’s popular enterprise applications. The greatest value to our products is how they tightly integrate with enterprise applications. When we look at our product development spending, we invest over 50% in the links to various products and in the QA process this approached 65%. Decisions about which products to build Connectors for is driven by our sales force and customer opportunities. We strongly believe in building products that customers are asking for.


WTT: Can you paint for us a vision of a fully eCopy-enabled office environment that has seamless integration between paper and digital, and leverages corporate intellectual assets by making them readily accessible enterprise-wide?

Mr. Ed Schmid: In a fully eCopy-enabled office, information flows seamlessly. Users feel little difference in working with paper documents vs. electronic ones. Employees are able to communicate instantaneously and all documents are accessible, unlocking all the information that has been stored in filing cabinets. There is a bridge that connects the paper and digital worlds.


WTT: It certainly seems that having a set of services such as those eCopy enables would drive more rapid adoption of network connectivity. Care to make any projections?

Mr. Ed Schmid: According to Gartner, 5% of the world is scanning from digital copiers right now. Of the digital copiers sold today, Canon, our partner, says that 60% of their units are connected. We believe that in the next five years use of scanning functionality on digital copiers will show the most rapid growth. eCopy believes that in 5 years 90% of digital copiers will be connected and they will all include print, scan and copy functionality.


WTT: As somewhat of an evangelist on this subject, what advice would you have for vendors in the document imaging space?

Mr. Ed Schmid: Increasingly as devices become connected, end users will push us to deliver a variety of solutions for digital copiers and this will require an "open architecture" where software developers can add functionality into the digital copier.


WTT: And what advice would you have for our corporate readers?

Mr. Ed Schmid: Take a close look at scan-to-file and scan-to-email solutions as a way to improve productivity, reduce overall costs, take full advantage of your digital copiers, and streamline business processes. It’s a simple concept, really, and we find that once companies digitally enable one department in this way, the concept spreads quickly to other parts of the organization, increasing benefits exponentially.


Thank you Mr. Schmid.