New landscape for the imaging industry - trends in print for 2022

Johannesburg, January 2022 – Over the past two years the environment around us has drastically changed. As we look into the future, we see a number of digital transformation trends that will influence the world of imaging and printing for many years to come. While there haven't been many significant disruptive changes in printing technology over the past 18 months - what has changed is the processing power and consequently the quality of printing, and connectivity.
 
“Society started seeing the single greatest shift in consumer behaviour in recent years which is affecting the printing and imaging business to a considerable degree, in the shift to widespread remote working,” says Mohammed Vachiat, Head of Sales and Innovation at leading technology company Konica Minolta South Africa.
 
“Focusing on commercial, academic and government verticals we needed to adopt a more consumer and customer centric approach. Our original focus was supporting small and medium sized enterprises and catering for large scale work place environments. However, the printing industry was hit hard due to the work from home strategy as a large portion of our customers simultaneously requested products and solutions to enable their information workers to work remotely.”
 
Vachiat adds, “Part of our strategy for working from anywhere included mobile print, bizhub remote access and remote panel. This allows companies to turn their multifunctional device into a smart-technology hub that enables the secure flow of data and insights to facilitate collaboration across physical spaces such as the office and home.”
 
“With this global change comes a big move in favour of cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) with the multi-functional device (MFD) becoming commoditised in the process. In an instant we had to adapt from the traditional commodity selling to a solutions partner - meaning we had to look at additional value-add services, which includes virtual tools, applications and the ability to share documents to the cloud, integration to office 365, Dropbox and google workplace.”
 
Adaptability is key in 2022 and we have been successful in this time of uncertainty and proved our agility as a company by taking digital transformation to the level of the average worker. An MFP facilitates the full process of digitisation from beginning to end.