The 2016 KYOCERA Business & Technology Conference, held May 16 through 18 in Orlando, kicked off with a speed-painting demonstration followed by keynote speeches discussing the current and future state of the company. Key executives used the racecar metaphor to encourage dealers to take their business to the next level in offering customers a Total Document Solution (TDS), providing the ideal combination of hardware, software and services to customers. Kyocera’s holistic strategy revolves around providing solutions to customer problems that will improve workflow, reduce costs and boost productivity.
Another Year of Record-Breaking Growth
“If our business is a race car, you can think of this meeting as a pit stop,” said Ed Bialecki, Senior VP of Sales for Kyocera Document Solutions America (KDA). “It’s a chance to pull off the track for a few seconds, change the tires and refuel. By the time our pit stop is over, we’ll be ready to put the pedal to the floor and go further and faster than ever before.”
Bialecki went on to congratulate the dealers in the room for being instrumental in the company’s fifth straight year of growth, increasing revenue by 9.6 percent overall in the US and 3.4 percent in the Americas as a whole (this lower number is due to the exchange rate).
“When you put together 5 consecutive years of record results, that’s not just about market conditions or lucky breaks, not in today’s competitive environment. This kind of sustained performance only happens when you’ve got the right strategy, and the right partners to help execute on that strategy.”
Solutions for Common Business Challenges
In his keynote speech, Yukio Ikeda, CEO of KDA, noted that the company’s goal is “to improve our customers’ work quality.” And in following with this goal, the product expo was divided into pods that focused on a specific business challenge, with each area highlighting specific success stories in addressing those challenges by providing customers with the right mix of hardware, software and services. Focus areas of the pods were Capture and Distribution, Cost Control and Security, and Document Management.
DM Connect Pro powered by Nuance automates document processing with OCR (Optical Character Recognition), Forms Recognition, and 2D Barcode reading. PinPoint Scan 3 provides secure personal scanning; users can scan to a series of preconfigured destinations after entering a PIN code and all data is encrypted to protect sensitive information. Designed for enterprises with high security standards, PrivateScan lets authenticated users scan documents only to their own email address. A number of MFP connectors (Google Connector, Dropbox Connector and Square 9 Connector) were also featured at the expo.
Redesigned Fleet of Devices Takes Center Stage
In the final area of the product expo, 31 new products were the focal point of the “Live Office” area. KDA Vice President of Engineering Terry Knopsnyder highlighted the 15 A3 MFPs and 16 A4 MFPs and printers that would be available to dealers in the coming months. Some key advancements include true 1200 dpi at full engine speed, standard WiFi and NFC, as well as WiFi-direct. The black and color A3 MFPs range in speed from 25 to 80 ppm, while the printers and A4 MFPs range from 24 to 42 ppm. On the environmental front, one truly unique feature of the new A3 MFPs is the ability to use an empty black toner bottle as a waste toner container (once the bottle is inserted and rotated into place as a waste container, an internal mechanism “locks” the bottle so it can no longer be used as a supply item). From a usability standpoint, the control panels have a common look and feel to reduce the learning curve (there are slight differences between the TASKalfa and ECOSYS families, but models within each family share a consistent design).
Stay tuned for updates, as spec information will be added to bliQ in the coming months, and we’ll provide additional analysis once we get the new Kyocera models in our lab for testing.
