South Yorkshire solicitors choose Kodak i4600 production scanners for archiving and collaboration solution

Kodak has announced that Parker Rhodes Hickmotts, a local firm of solicitors in South Yorkshire, has purchased two Kodak i4600 production scanners and Kodak Capture Pro software to provide an enterprise archiving and collaboration solution to save physical storage space and make it easier to share court related legal information among the various parties in cases – document bundles which are often 500 or more pages thick. The scanners were sold by Kodak reseller, BMI Solutions.

Founded in 1895, Parker Rhodes Hickmotts provides a range of legal services including residential and commercial conveyancing, wills, probates and trusts, personal injury claims, family and child law, as well as handling a wide variety of immigration and asylum cases. It employs a team of 70 staff including solicitors, advocates, paralegals, secretaries and administrators, and has offices in Rotherham, Leeds and Wakefield.

All departments will use the new scanners to scan a variety of legal paperwork which has to be kept for a minimum of six years after cases close.  The new Kodak solution will enable the firm to close down some of its offsite storage and make it quicker for staff to access and share information.

Richard Ellis, Parker Rhodes Hickmotts' IT manager, says, "Our existing multi-functional printer (MFP) solution could only handle 30 pages per minute whereas the Kodak i4600 scanners are four times as fast.  This is key as we have to process large document bundles for sharing when cases are live or storing when cases end. The hopper takes 500 pages which we simply load and all the data is scanned into our client management system for easy archiving, emailing, printing or electronic file transfer."

Offering a capacity of 50,000 pages per day with speeds of up to 120 pages per minute,

Parker Rhodes Hickmotts were particularly attracted by the range of features which come with the Kodak i4600 production scanners.

The front-loading feeder with Kodak Sure Stack technology stacks documents properly in the exit tray after being digitised so that paper doesn't get mixed up or jams occur. With the switchable straight-through paper path feeding, even hard paper such as ID cards can be processed, too.

In addition, up to nine pre-set scanning destinations can be chosen so that – at a touch of button – staff can output to common places to make the whole process of scanning paper much easier.

The i4600 scanners feature the latest version of Kodak's Perfect Page Imaging processing technology with blank page removal, auto orientation, auto crop, and de-skew and iThresholding which comes with new features such as streak and punch hole removal. Furthermore, the Kodak i4600 uses LED light to capture the images, meaning no warm up time and a massive reduction in power consumed.

Richard Ellis adds, "We tested other scanners on the market but rejected them as they tended to jam more frequently, were harder to maintain from a software configuration point of view and were missing several key features.  The physical quality of the Kodak scanners impressed, they're easy to programme and didn't slow down when the various features were enabled which was why we chose them."

The Kodak i4600 scanners and Capture Pro software have been deployed with end-user training complete.  Moving forward, Parker Rhodes Hickmotts is considering eventually becoming a fully paperless business.

Neil Murphy, Kodak's UK sales manager says, "Our i4600 production scanners are perfect for small to medium sized businesses wanting to cost effectively automate document capture and document management.  Not only are they power efficient, but price of consumables like separation and pick rollers are low which helps reduce the ongoing running costs."