Business & Money | Friday 19 June, 2015 4:04 pm |

To support substantial customer demand for production scanners in the kingdom, Kodak Alaris announces today that it is opening dedicated service centres in Saudi Arabia to provide fast local support throughout the country for organisations using both Kodak branded as well as third party scanner equipment.

The new centres will open in June 2015 and are located in the capital, Riyadh, along with Jeddah, Dammam and Khamis Mushait. Kodak Alaris is the first scanner vendor to open facilities in the country to assist customers. This is key given high volume production scanners are fundamental to business process workflows and ensuring equipment availability and uptime is crucial.

Various service packages are available including four and eight-hour break/fix response times in addition to bespoke service level agreements based on individual customer requirements.

Kodak Alaris has invested considerably to grow its presence in Saudi Arabia over the past few years and now employs both sales and technical teams. Revenue from scanner sales has more than doubled since 2012. This has been driven by the tremendous wave of digitisation projects underpinning various smart government initiatives, rapid growth of medical records scanning and significant success winning business from Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) who provide solutions to various industry sectors such as banking and insurance. Kodak Alaris supplied scanners are now used in practically all BPOs in the kingdom.

David Whitton, Kodak Alaris’ regional sales director for the Middle East and Africa, says, “About 50% of the scanner market in the Middle East is located in Saudi Arabia. Given the volume of production scanners we sell today, increasing our service footprint countrywide is vital to support customers when they make significant hardware purchases. We now have skilled and experienced engineers on hand to ensure customers get the best possible value from using equipment we have supplied.”

According to analysts, InfoSource, Kodak Alaris Information Management has a leadership position in EAMER – based on market size - in mid and high volume production scanning and is one of the top 3 vendors in other segments including low volume production, departmental and workgroup scanning.