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Living without the power of a smartphone is probably inconceivable for most of us. What has already become a way of life in the consumer space is also being adopted by more and more enterprises. In recent years, businesses across Europe have slowly been recognising the benefits of equipping their employees with mobile smart devices to support a more flexible workforce that needs to remain productive when outside of office.

In addition, organisations have been upgrading technology in the office to reflect this more mobile approach to working. We are seeing an increasing amount of printers and scanners that include Wi-Fi and can connect to cloud applications, which caters to the needs of those employees already working with smartphones, tablets or laptops, or the ones that will do so in the future. Our Office Insights report (a quantitative survey of 1,671 employees across Europe, sampling a wide range of industries and departments within small and large organisations, administered as an on-line questionnaire) confirmed how useful those capabilities are as more than two-thirds of respondents stated that Wi-Fi enabled printers or scanners have a positive impact on their productivity, while almost half considered automatic sending of scanned documents to the cloud as valuable.

Yet, this trend of managing business processes through mobile devices has yet to peak. Simply equipping employees with mobile devices is insufficient if they don't understand their capabilities. Organisations need to provide better training, particularly around how employees can be productive 'on the go' through smart use of mobile technology. This way, employees who probably only use a fraction of the mobile functions at their disposal can be converted into power users who really drive the business while outside the office.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
We've recently spoken to decision-makers across Europe who seem to be optimistic about the future, but there are challenges on the way with the large majority stating that driving profitability is one of the biggest obstacles when it comes to achieving growth. Being able to more efficiently process paper-based information into business workflows and content management systems will be one of the solutions to this challenge. We also foresee some growing trends in document capture, such as changes in the type of devices being used for scanning, the location of where the customer transaction and processing is taking place, and how information is extracted and dynamically communicated between the on-premise software systems and the capture device.

We expect the growing trend of businesses utilising smart mobile technologies to continue in 2014 as mobile workforces become empowered with the right tools to access and process information from outside the office, addressing inefficiencies that limit their profit potential. However, it is likely that some organisations will deploy such solutions without visibly defining a mobile strategy. As such, it is clear that there is a need for organisations to not only outline a strategy for mobile technology usage, but also deliver additional staff training that enables employees to really unlock the true potential of their mobility.

In order to better support employees, we see the capacity for more organisations to introduce business process capture apps for specific document processes and workflows. These apps may work across multiple capture device platforms such as MFDs, network scanners and mobile devices and would allow employees in the office or on-the-go to process documents using the same familiar interface. An example of this could be an app for processing travel expenses. Utilising web services, these business apps could be rolled out to the capture devices within an organisation and possibly delivered as a SaaS platform by independent solution vendors or in-house IT departments.
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