Teachers get inspired: Meet Bethany Neel, 2014 INSPIRE Award recipient

Lexmark has honored a math specialist in Paris, Ky., with INSPIRE: Lexmark’s Teaching Award. The program recognizes outstanding Central Kentucky area elementary, middle and high school science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers.

Bethany Neel, a math interventionist/resource teacher at Cane Ridge Elementary School, was presented with an INSPIRE award presented in front of her peers and students last month.

Neel is involved with school-wide mathematics professional development and is a proponent of strategy-based mental math/computational instructional methods. As an example, she introduced Number Talks to the classrooms, which are short activities focused on mental math strategies. Students are solving math problems pulled from their daily lives.

Lexmark presented Neel with a $1,000 award to be used to promote STEM education at her school.

Know an outstanding STEM teacher? Nominate him/her now!

In order to be eligible for the INSPIRE award, a teacher must receive an online nomination as well as one reference letter from students, colleagues, parents, school administrators or community leaders. Eligible nominees must teach elementary, middle or high school students in one of the following Central Kentucky counties: Anderson, Bourbon, Clark, Fayette, Franklin, Jessamine, Madison, Scott and Woodford. Nominations can be made on the INSPIRE: Lexmark’s Teaching Award page on Lexmark.com.

Lexmark announces new solution at NRF, tackling costly retail problem

This story originally appeared on Lexmark News Blog 1/13/2014

Lexmark will be in attendance at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) annual Convention and Expo in New York City this week. The team will be in booth 4028, showcasing retail specific solutions to enable retailers to make their business run better so they can focus on what they do best: retailing.

We’ll be blogging, posting customer videos and interviews and showcasing our solutions throughout the week on the AccessViaretail blog, Checking Out Retail. Be sure to follow the link and sign-up to get up-to-date information in real time.

Today, Lexmark is announcing a new solution for the retail market, Lexmark’s Incident Management for Retail.

The solution simplifies and expedites reporting on incidents such as shoplifting, internal theft and accidents, while bridging the gap between retailers’ investigative systems and the unstructured information those systems don’t manage.

Currently most retailers use manual, document-intensive processes to manage incident information. Most of their investigative systems offer limited or no support to attach photos, videos, signed forms and other unstructured information, resulting in an incomplete view of incidents.

Incident Management for Retail enables retailers to:

*   Open a new case from a mobile device or smart MFP

*   Scan/upload documents for a complete incident file

*   Manage unstructured incident files in context with other systems

*   Output incident files on demand

*   Extend insight into the complete incident picture

The solution reduces manual, time-intensive paperwork and allows staff to focus on customer sales and service; improves the quality of investigations; extends the value of current investigative systems; and increases visibility and insights that can help mitigate risk and reduce losses, among other benefits.

For more information on the solution, stop by the booth at NRF, orcheck out this link or watch the video below to find out more information.

IDC MarketScape names Lexmark an industry leader in smart MFPs

Lexmark International, Inc. was recognized this week as a Leader in smart multifunction products (MFPs) by the IDC MarketScape 2013 Smart MFP report, which analyzes the strategies and current capabilities of companies providing smart MFPs.

As defined by the IDC MarketScape, Leaders are companies that have led and continue to lead the market in both breadth of offering and strategic intent.

“Lexmark is very appreciative of the recognition by IDC as an industry leader in smart MFPs”, said Brian Henderson, Director, Worldwide Product Marketing. “We are proud of the technology advances that we have brought to our customers over the past decade and take pride in enabling them to easily implement our flexible solutions into their business areas.”

The report notes “Lexmark holds a leadership position in managed print services as well as extensive software ecosystem1.”

The report also notes, “More than most vendors, Lexmark prides itself on having an ownership stake in technology. The company has internally-developed or acquired not only hardware technologies, but also several software solutions targeting mobility, cloud, capture, content/process management as well as managed print services. The intent of such an effort gives Lexmark responsiveness advantages and a greater ability to customize end-to-end process improvement solutions1.”

To read the press release in full, please click here.

To read the IDC MarketScape Report, please click here.

15 attributes of a true vendor neutral archive

This post originally appeared on the Lexmark News Blog:

The implementation of a vendor neutral archive (VNA) eliminates data silos, cuts costs and facilitates data sharing by streamlining integration to the PACS and EMR. To achieve these benefits it is vital you choose a truly independent VNA. This checklist highlights the essential attributes, qualifications and functionality to consider when selecting your VNA solution partner.

1. PACS aggregation and federation: The VNA should be able to aggregate query results from multiple disparate PACS or locations

2. Dynamic DICOM tag morphing: Confirm that the product will perform on-the-fly conversion/ mapping of data elements in a DICOM header in support of data exchange between PACS. It should use a “self-learning” library of DICOM conformance

Click here to read the rest of the article on Perceptive’s InContextMagazine.

Lexmark News Blog: Top 5 Blog Posts of 2013

Happy New Year! As our 2013 gift to you, we’ve rounded up our top 5 most-clicked stories of the past year. Enjoy, and look for new posts in the coming weeks on some interesting new projects and announcements coming from Lexmark and Perceptive Software.

1. What is the ideal life span for your devices?

3. Lexmark and the PGA Championship – A Sponsorship that Scores Big in the World of Professional Golf

2. Let us introduce you: Saperion, Lexmark’s newest company acquisition

4.  Lexmark selected for United Nations Global Compact 100 stock index

5. Lexmark insights at NRF 2013: interview with Juicy Couture

Electronic benefits you can take to the bank

This post originally appeared on the Lexmark News Blog

Receivables automation combats the hassles of getting paid, puts cash in hands and creates new opportunities

Without having to focus time and attention on manually reconciling remittance data with incoming payments, accounts receivable (AR) departments would be well-situated to engage in more strategic, forward-looking activities. These departments could put monies to better use, build the groundwork for market share and actual-dollar growth, and better tackle the supply chain and customer-facing needs that persist and fluctuate with external dynamics.

However, according to a recent report issued by the Aite Group, “Deploying Emerging Technology to Improve Remittance-Details Processing,” more than 50 percent of enterprises—including large, multinational corporations and mid market companies alike—can claim no touchless processing of remittance documents whatsoever. A number of factors contribute to this; some have an easy fix while others would seem insurmountable, yet a considerable array of technologies and best practices exist to drive manual work out of the accounts receivable role.

Click here to read the rest of the article on Perceptive Software’s “InContext Magazine”.

Saperion acquisition expands Lexmark/Perceptive Software’s footprint

Lexmark recently completed its acquisition of Saperion, a Germany-based developer and provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software in Europe. Saperion will report into Lexmark’s Perceptive Softwaredivision. Sascha Ohler, director of product management, international, for Saperion, sat down to discuss what Saperion does and how it fits into Lexmark’s overall business strategy.

Lexmark: Tell us about Saperion’s technology solutions.

Ohler: Saperion’s solutions enable customers to capture, store and access information. We provide a robust ECM platform that allows partners to extend the ECM functionality to specific industries. These products are highly scalable, easily integrate with all major ERP, email and document management systems, and are mobile capable, which is a real concern for our customers.

We focus on document management, document archiving and integration of the documents into business processes. We have several offerings, I will focus on a few that really stand out.

Saperion has a Web content archiving solution that is used for online retailers, large insurance companies or banks that do business through online portals. Did you know that 8 to 10 percent of transactions online are later cancelled because a customer states that they didn’t actually agree to the transaction? To combat this, Saperion has a tool that takes a snapshot of the screen when a customer submits for a purchase online. If the purchase is later scrutinized, the screenshot provides an additional layer of oversight to the transaction.

Another interesting technology is Saperion’s corporate content collaboration solution, fileNshare. It provides the ability to securely share corporate content with internal and external parties while conforming to corporate security standards.  Once a document is uploaded it can be managed and shared through a simple, yet robust privilege structure. And a key for any business, the documents can be accessed from mobile devices using both native and Web-based user interfaces.

In the area of consolidation services, Saperion has a solution that has saved some of our customers millions of dollars. Let’s say you are an enterprise customer that has multiple large content repositories, for example in support of your SAP system.  Today you will be forced to maintain all of these repositories indefinitely if you need to access some or all of the content at some point. This also means paying the repository vendor for maintenance. TheSaperion Consolidation Services offer customers the ability to reduce these maintenance fees by providing a way to access the content, independent of repository through a unified Saperion user interface. Data and content access is maintained and maintenance cost is lowered without the need for a lengthy content migration.

Lexmark: How does Saperion fit in with Perceptive Software?

Ohler: From a product portfolio perspective, Saperion will bring some unique product offerings, such as those discussed above. From a footprint perspective, Saperion brings a well-developed European customer base and partner channel to the table. We feel that we can only elevate the Perceptive Software name and brand, particularly in Europe.

Lexmark: What are you focused on right now as Saperion joins with the Lexmark/Perceptive team? 

Ohler: Saperion leadership just returned from a 10-day knowledge exchange at Perceptive headquarters in Kansas City, and we continue to work on the road map toward product integration. We are making very good progress.

To find out more information on how Saperion can help your business, click here.