Office technology takes off.

• Author: Phelps, Jack E.
• Position: Innovative office products

Boost your business productivity with these jet-age inventions in office products.

Office automation is an old story, but new chapters are being written today at whirlwind rates. The latest buzzword is the "information superhighway." You could say the information highway first came to the office with the telephone. More recently, the facsimile machine and the computer modem have added new dimensions to business communications.

As office equipment becomes more sophisticated, it is changing the way businesses look at their own operations. Bob Ballow, president of The Office Place, notes one trend. "The growth in the white-collar workforce is over," he says. "Companies are downsizing in that area. In some cases, a whole layer of management is being cut out."

Office technology, Ballow says, is intended to make offices more efficient, to allow the office worker to be more productive. By accomplishing that goal, equipment manufacturers help companies do more with a smaller office staff.

ALL THE FAX

Take the fax machine, for example. Only a few years ago, when faxes first came into common use, they employed a thermal-print process requiring special paper that came on a roll. The resulting copy curled up and eventually faded. If the document was more than one page long, it had to be cut, and usually it was photocopied by the recipient. All this was extremely inefficient, even though the fax itself was an improvement in document communications over using couriers or mail service.

"The thermal-paper fax is pretty much obsolete now," says Ballow. Wayne Rysdahl, manager of Alaskan Office Source, explains. "The price per copy with a thermal fax is very expensive. First you have to buy that special paper, then the first thing most people do is make a photocopy. So you have the cost of the copy, plus the cost of someone standing there at the copy machine making the copy. The only people still using thermal-paper faxes are the really low-volume users."

Martha Jorgensen, marketing support representative with Arctic Office Products, says her company sells two lines of plain-paper fax machines made by Canon. On the lower end of the scale is the Bubble-Jet line. These are full-featured, 9,600-baud-per-second (bps) plain-paper faxes that handle a variety of paper sizes and capacities.

According to one local expert, three brands account for the majority of Alaska's fax sales: Canon, Ricoh and Sharp. Xerox, Konica, Toshiba, Panasonic, Savin and others share the...