An employee of Engineering Reproduction in Detroit scans some old documents.
By Ed Avis
When APDSP started a google ad campaign to drive traffic to the online Member Directory about a month ago, a set of key search terms was selected. When someone in the AEC industry searches using these terms, an ad for the APDSP directory shows up. Which term has generated the most successful clicks to the directory? “Scanning.”
Scanning has been an important service for reprographics firms for decades, but COVID changed things. Not only did sales of slower, more affordable scanners jump over the past year – presumably for home use by architects and engineers locked out of their offices -- but many reprographics firms report that big production scanning jobs picked up, too.
“What we’ve heard from reprographics companies is that their print volumes have dropped, but scanning and/or archiving work has increased,” says Rich Gigl, senior vice president of National AZON, adding that scanner sales also increased. “When the pandemic hit and everyone was kind of pushed out to remote offices, I knew the personal scanning products market would go nuts.”
Nobody in the Office
Obviously, architects and engineers working from home would be less effective if they didn’t have easy access to drawings. So if they were used to walking down the office hallway to a document storage room and grabbing a roll of prints, they had to change their practices once COVID hit.
“Many organizations experienced that sending everyone into the home office only works if the documents are close to 100 percent digitally accessible,” notes Thomas Ingendoh, president of scanner manufacturer Image Access. “If all or too many workers are at home, your degree of digitization needs to be very high to still be functional.”
That means people need who work with large-format documents need a scanner in the home office. Slower, lower-end scanners sold remarkably well during 2020, Gigl says. National AZON distributes the Contex SD One scanners, which are designed for low-volume use, and Gigl says they flew off the shelves.
“You pop these right out of the box and plug them in,” he says. “And they’re compact and inexpensive, about $3,000 to $3,800.”
Ingendoh reports the same situation – Image Access sold 30 percent more scanners in 2020 than 2019, and that increase came from more affordable, lower speed scanners.
One of the challenges of selling scanner equipment during COVID was getting in to see customers, of course. Gigl says they created remote video demonstration abilities to take advantage of the sales leads Contex was providing.
“We let all the resellers know we can demonstrate the products,” he says. “We told them, ‘Here’s the lead, we can do the demo, you close the deal.’”
Not Just Slower Scanners
Even though the growth in equipment sales came mostly from the home scanner market, that doesn’t mean production scanning wasn’t happening. Some reprographics firms discovered that clients with time on their hands decided to scan large repositories of documents, and others have simply seen an increase in overall reprographics.
Jonathan Shuert, general manager of Engineering Reproduction in Detroit, said his company recently scanned in five rooms filled with drawings at an entertainment facility in that city. And the housing market in his area boomed over the past year, which helped both their scanning and printing business.
“We’ve seen a huge increase in our homebuilding companies, really a lot more than usual,” Shuert says. “We’ve got companies that we would hear from once or twice a month, and now we’re printing all day for them.”
Scanning for these clients also has increased, Shuert says. His company added a 60-inch Contex scanner during COVID to better accommodate scans of mixed sets of color and monochrome prints.
“We’re seeing a ton of customers who are incorporating the floor plan, the front façade and other drawings in a mixed set,” he says. “We print it and they mark it up and bring it back. With the new Contex we can scan the whole mixed set on one scanner. It’s super helpful.”
Will It Last?
The sales of slower scanners destined for home offices might diminish as COVID lets up, but the overall scanning market shows no sign of abating.
Ingendoh says Image Access has noticed higher demand from government entities who want to digitize and archive records, and his R&D department is working on software to make that process so easy that even clients of these entities could do the scanning themselves. This work includes small- and large-format documents.
Steve Blanken, general manager of Contex Americas, says the enormous quantity of paper documents in the world points to long life for the scanning market: “We’d like to be able to predict how long the scanning/archiving business will last, but every time we walk into a drawing room of a utility there’s years of work in there. We’ve been at the New Jersey Department of Transportation and they have a 4,000-square-foot room filled with nothing but plans. They send out bids every year to have them scanned. In the past it’s been cost prohibitive, but I bet in the next year they do it. We all hear that paper is going away, but there’s so much out there, I don’t know that it will ever go away.”
Shuert echoes that: “My uncle is an architect, and he has four storage units filled with drawings. I ask him, ‘Will you scan it?’ He says, ‘Yeah, eventually.’”
All of this means good future business for reprographics firms and the scanner manufacturers who supply them. Image Access’ revenue overall was flat in 2020, Ingendoh says, despite the increase in sales of scanners, since most of those were the more affordable type. But 2021 is looking better.
“The first quarter of 2021 looks very promising, especially in the U.S.,” Ingendoh says. “We expect to grow business significantly in 2021.”
Azon’s Gigl is also hopeful about scanner sales this year: “Now as the pandemic is lessening, there’s more optimism and we’re starting to see more sales of production scanners and production scanning equipment, like our Zero Turn Scanning Productivity Center. There’s a lot of scanning and archiving going on.”