Ricoh's Francois Latouche talks about why he developed ESA TransFormer

Almost everyone, at some time or another, has had to retype a document from a hard copy, wasting time, resources, and sanity! Ricoh’s Business Solutions Group believed there had to be a better way.

“We identified a market need for a simple OCR scanning solution that was easy to operate from our multifunctional printers,” explained Francois Latouche, Analyst/Programmer for Ricoh Australia.

“We wanted to develop a simple integrated solution that let people scan and transform their documents into usable files on their PCs. The result is ESA TransFormer.”

He continued, “I developed a solution that enables users to easily select a contact profile from an address book.”

When a user walks up to the device they select their name, which has their profile set-up to remember a preferred file format and destination email address or folder.

“For my profile I’ve chosen to default the format to searchable PDF. If I want to change the scanning format, I simply press the Format button to choose Word, Excel and so on.”

ESA TransFormer enables users to tailor their scanning further. If someone wants to scan 10 pages, they can choose whether to save it all in one file or ten different files. This comes in handy with scanning documents like invoices.

“Once I scan the document, it’s waiting for me back on my computer,” said Francois.

“ESA TransFormer does the trick. It’s not just efficient to use – it’s also cost efficient. Since the user interface is embedded straight onto the MFP, you’re only paying for one license rather than a license per workstation.”

“The part I really enjoyed most was seeing this project through from start to finish. We saw an efficiency issue our customers were facing in their day-to-day business and we were able to find a better way,” he concluded.