Imaging and capture solutions vendor, Kodak Alaris has hailed its recently held virtual Partner Summit a success after over 200 partners joined the vendor at it online event. T
The global information capture specialist had planned on holding its annual partner conference for the EMEA region in Vienna from April 21 – 23, but in light of the current COVID-19 crisis, decided to take the event virtual.
Don Lofstrom, president and general manager, Alaris, confirmed that despite the challenges presented by the current global pandemic, Kodak Alaris’ performance in the financial year ended March 31, 2020 was strong overall.
In his keynote address to channel partners, Lofstrom provided an update on the impact of COVID-19 on the business and the marketplace over the past four months, as well as steps Kodak Alaris has taken to minimise disruption to its customers.
“Employee safety and supply chain management have been at the forefront of the company’s focus,” Lofstrom said. “Our supply chain is now intact and strong, our manufacturing sites in China are up and running at nearly full capacity. Scanner production is over 95% capacity now compared with 40% in March. Our secondary supply chain partners are also beginning to normalise, although we continue to monitor this very carefully in certain regions.”
Whilst March brought some delays and slippage to orders, Lofstrom said that this month has seen increased demand from a number of sectors including healthcare and logistics. “Work from home mandates are also creating market needs for digitisation and remote collaboration solutions that involve our digital capture and software offers,” he explained, adding the company has also increased its use of remote monitoring and service.
“These have been done to ensure we keep customers up and running, and do continue to provide essential on-site service in locations where government mandates allow,” he said.
The company revealed 66% of partners who attended the virtual event said that COVID-19 had “considerably changed” their business and that they were looking to change their business strategy.
Lofstrom said that Kodak Alaris is thinking outside the box, looking for opportunities to offer expertise to help channel partners overcome these new challenges. “We expect some short-term decline for most applications as a result of the crisis but are confident that there will be some pockets of incremental demand,” he remarked. “The need to share documents across remote teams and accurately capture data and automate business processes will remain critical, with many organisations under pressure to remove manual steps and reduce staff time.”
