CityHub helps lean startups impress with Canon office solution

By SearchSMBAsia Editors | Jun 5, 2009

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For businesses entering new markets, the tedious process of starting up an operation-ready office may steal precious time and money away from aggressively pursuing market opportunities. So, by offering office infrastructure as a utility, like electricity or water,  CityHub, a provider of fully equipped office space and services, hopes to minimize start-up cost and pain.

In CityHub's business model, entrepreneurs only pay for they want and use. They can scale up or down operations at will so if there is a dip in the market, customers can easily downsize. And when business booms, they can quickly expand to take advantage of the market growth.

But to offer such services at a reasonable and competitive price, CityHub needed to drive costs out of their infrastructure. The company need to optimize its infrastructure to deal with a variety of clients and yet provide the personalized service required by them.  

Going digital

One solution that CityHub deployed is a centralized server for digital archiving of important documents.  

Using Canon's secured digital scanning and archiving for highly confidential documents like contracts and quotations did away with the need for rows of storage cabinets. As a result, tenants did not have to pay for space, saving on cost as well as time and effort in seeking and purchasing office equipment such as fax machines or copiers.

Each CityHub tenant office is networked to a central, all-in-one printer, allowing tenants to print, scan, fax and archive their documents. The intelligent printer is usedto scan and archive their documents for secure storage.

Secure access

Only authorized tenants have access to their documents and folders via biometric fingerprint authentication.  Once a tenant is logged into the Canon eCopy system, an intelligent scanning solution specifies which digital folder their document will be scanned and archived to.  Folders specific to the company, are not accessible to other tenants or CityHub staff.

“I’m really impressed by the central scanning and biometric infrastructure," said Daniel Kennedy, business development director at Capital Market Solutions, a CityHub client. "We have  a lot of signed-off contracts and quotes here that I need to originally photocopy and send back to head office so it would be good to have them in a digital copy, without the hassle of having to file all the papers."