Technology has changed the way we conduct business, and its continuous evolution over the years has made it increasingly more possible to run and manage a business more effectively, particularly when it comes to collaborative projects where stakeholders reside in disparate locations.
There are hundreds of technology tools and processes available that make managing a business more efficient, from smart phones to video-conferencing, all designed to deliver better results, reduce costs, and allow for agility in the workplace. Taken a step further, these tools can be integrated into efficient systems that remove the physical hurdles from a global creative process, allowing participants the time and space to invest in the project, rather than waste it on travel.
Epson offers collaborating professionals just such a package of these products, services and technologies, making it even easier for creative companies to improve efficiency and productivity.
Vernon Mellors, Large Format product manager at Epson South Africa, explains how combining projector technology with printer capabilities can help regional and global businesses collaborate, saving time and money.
Designing a building - whether it's a home or a commercial property - is an ongoing collaborative process between the client an architects, quantity surveyors, engineers and multiple other stakeholders, with many professionals located in different parts of town, possibly even in different parts of the country or the world.
Bringing professional teams together to have real-time conversations about evolutions in a project's design can be time-consuming, expensive and often frustrating, with multiple hard copies of the design being carried between meeting sites. While it would be ideal to be able to e-mail drawings between parties, the sheer size of design documents, combined with challenging bandwidth connectivity in South Africa, makes it more trouble than it's worth to send large files electronically.
For the first time, however, there's an alternative possibility, a way for professional teams on a design project to collaborate from the comfort of their own boardrooms, wherever in the world those boardrooms may be.
Epson, global leaders in printing and projection innovation, has a range of projectors and printers that, if set up in an integrated system, take all the hassle, travel and frustration out of professional team meetings.
The Epson EB-1420Wi and EB-1430Wi ultra-short-throw projectors, already very popular in business and education applications, turns any blank wall or desk into an interactive drawing board. With project drawings projected onto any flat surface, role-players are able to interact with the drawing as if it was on a touch screen, drawing over the plans, adding comments and discussing with anyone else in the meeting.
What's more, the Epson EB-1420Wi and EB-1430Wi projectors are a WiFi device, which means that the scenario playing out can be seen by anyone else on the other end of a broadband connection who has a similar Epson projector installed. They too will see the plans projected onto a wall, and all parties involved can share their written thoughts and comments onto the drawings.
The next step is to print the drawings out - because hard copies of drawings are always a vital part of the process. Installing an Epson SureColor T-Series large format printer on the same LAN as the Epson ultra-short-throw projector on site means that all parties involved can produce the collateral that they need in real time, making updated plans available immediately after their project meeting.
A further possible integration into the system is an Epson Discproducer PP-100N printer, which can write up to 30 copies of a CD or DVD per hour (depending on data size), quickly and efficiently creating soft copies of drawings for everyone involved for them to distribute as required.
While this integrated system is ideal for the architecture profession, it would achieve tremendous cost savings in other sectors where design, production and printing stakeholders are in different parts of a city, country or the world.
For example, Epson estimates that around 30% of all printed promotional material for retail arrives late, arrives damaged, or just gets lost. Retail chains installing projectors and large format printers in each outlet would allow easy discussion over the localisation of campaigns, with each store able to print its own marketing collateral as and when they needed it, on site and immediately.
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