Konica Minolta provides Brandhouse with office automation solutions

Konica Minolta South Africa has been awarded a contract to provide office automation solutions to one of South Africa’s largest alcohol beverage companies, Brandhouse Beverages.

Brandhouse, a joint venture between three international parent companies: Diageo, Heineken International and Namibia Breweries Limited, has over 60 service outlets across Southern Africa, many of which are in remote areas.

According to Cape Town branch manager at Konica Minolta South Africa, Alten Hulme, the company invited suppliers to present solutions that would help it curb the excessive use of its print, copy, scan and fax machines.

Konica Minolta South Africa introduced its Pcounter software, which helps businesses overcome the challenges of paper and other resource wastage from unproductive printing, copying, and the use of colour for jobs where it is not needed.

“The software adds value by offering print and document accounting solutions for a wide variety of industries, achieving enhanced productivity and cost savings for customers. This enables clients to understand their current cost of printing and document management, optimise the use of existing devices, recover costs where possible, increase productivity by releasing a print job to the most appropriate device and minimise expenses through rules based printing,” says Hulme.

He adds that Konica Minolta South Africa’s service network of more than 60 branches and dealers illustrates the company’s capacity to access, provide and service all of Brandhouse’s outlets, even the remote ones. This minimises the risk of downtime, increasing productivity and user efficiency.

“Minimising downtime and increasing customer service at Brandhouse will also be assisted by Konica Minolta South Africa’s bizhub vCare, a software system designed to enhance customer care through efficient management of Konica Minolta multifunctional devices,” he says.

vCare, in short, notifies the Konica Minolta South Africa call centre of all service calls, toner refills and preventative service calls via e-mail. It also forwards monthly meter readings, eliminating human errors when recording meter readings.

“We are proud to have been awarded the Brandhouse account and confident that we will, through careful planning and a client-oriented mindset, drastically minimise costs and improve the customer experience for Brandhouse,” concludes Hulme.