Office automation equipment company Develop South Africa aims to grow the local market for its office process systems in schools, municipalities, universities and large enterprises.

It also aims to leverage its presence in small and medium-sized enterprises to grow organically, says Develop South Africa GM Sudhir Daya.

The office-hub systems can process typed documents and digitise the information using optical character recognition for use across organisational processes. The devices also provide printing, emailing and faxing functions.

“The Develop equipment enables a company to get data to the back end. We integrate the data streams into its enterprise resource planning systems and focus on improving collaboration through ease of capturing and transmitting data,” he explains.

“Automation is increasingly prevalent in many organisations, because it reduces human errors, such as typing errors, as well as making indexing, labelling and archiving of data faster and more accurate.”

Automation and availability of data also support the growing use of analytics, intelligent systems and robotics, and serve as a key way of gaining the greatest productivity and value from business applications and systems, he adds.

Develop South Africa sells office automation equipment to its clients through a distributor network and provides technical training for the distributors and channel partners. The equipment does not rely on specific office information technology (IT) systems, and can integrate with all commonly used office software and cloud systems, says Daya.

“We have a good presence among small and medium-sized companies, as well as some large clients using our equipment. We aim to use our existing market share to grow our presence among larger clients, including schools, municipalities, universities and even blue-chip companies.”