A new era of cloud print management

Taking existing cooperation to the next level: Cloud print management

Inter Cars Hellas commenced its cooperation with Konica Minolta from the very start of the company’s presence in the Greek market in 2017. Konica Minolta was appointed to provide customised solutions that would deliver high productivity efficiently. Through the years of cooperating together, Konica Minolta and Inter Cars have built a strong and loyal relationship thanks to the responsiveness that Konica Minolta has shown over the years in providing outstanding services and support.

To become the market leader in its field in Greece is the core objective of Inter Cars. It sees the key to this in digital transformation. As a result, Konica Minolta was recently appointed again to provide an improved customised solution to modernise the Inter Cars printing processes, taking advantage of the latest technologies and adapting to the current needs of the company. “We were happy to continue and upgrade our relationship with Konica Minolta since all these years the company has surprised us with its expertise in providing optimum solutions for us,” said Thodoris Sioutis, IT Manager at Inter Cars Hellas.

Konica Minolta wanted to provide an enhanced solution to meet Inter Cars’s current needs for cost controlling, security, and print management. The solution proposed by Konica Minolta is the Dispatcher Paragon Cloud SaaS print management solution together with six high technology MFPs. With Dispatcher Paragon Cloud, organisations can simplify their print operations and outsource their print infrastructure. The solution optimises cost structure and overview through a fixed monthly fee for Inter Cars, all without compromising security. Dispatcher Paragon Cloud leverages the award-winning Dispatcher Paragon on-premise solution – recipient of Keypoint Intelligence’s BLI 2021 Pick Award – combined with the value of the cloud.

Dispatcher Paragon Cloud covers all the needs for the administrator such as central control of access rights, reporting, prevention of unauthorised usage and real-time tracking. The users benefit by using features such as Follow-Me Print to ensure better productivity. From the organisation’s point of view this solution provides lower costs with no need for additional infrastructure such as physical servers. “We chose this solution after several discussions with our valuable partners at Konica Minolta Greece. The idea of a cloud-based print management solution was very appealing to us because we believe that a pure cloud-based solutions can minimise administration and infrastructure costs. One of the main reasons that led us to implement Dispatcher Paragon Cloud is the fast and easy provisioning process. I would say that our experience so far is great, and I would like to emphasise that in my opinion cloud sooner or later is going to be the future. We all need to consider this kind of solution seriously for the sustainability of our organisations,” underlined Thodoris Sioutis.

Rapid deployment and fast adoption

The Dispatcher Paragon Cloud services are completely flexible to cater for a myriad of network infrastructures, including Zero Trust environments, based on a stringent identity verification process. This ensures that only authenticated and authorised users and devices have access to applications and data. Inter Cars initially secured everything on its Azure Active Directory services, and once ready Konica Minolta’s trained technicians smoothly created the necessary Dispatcher Paragon Cloud tenant. The process was very fast and simple. After configuring some necessary settings regarding default printing preferences, print rules and scanning workflows, Inter Cars now has a productive and secure solution that has boosted the usage of its Konica Minolta hardware, which was also brought up to date with the brand new multifunctional printing systems that were deployed.Printing defaults were set to black and white and double-sided for cost efficiency reasons.

Dispatcher Paragon Cloud user management enables the IT department of Inter Cars to easily create and assign users, among other things. The self-service process of user auto creation and card registration helped with an easy roll-out. Also, thanks to the Follow-Me functionality, Inter Cars made sure that documents can only be printed after prior authentication at the device’s proximity card readers. Lastly, Scan-to-Me functionality ensured that scanned documents are delivered with one click and in a secure way to employees’ email accounts.

After the deployment all the employees are now able to print, copy and scan documents with minimum effort.