Canon Unveils its Vision of Smart Tech in Asia1
Helping businesses and cities build resiliency in a post-pandemic world with Smart Workplace, Smart Vertical and Smart Surveillance technologies
SINGAPORE, 14 August 2023 — Canon today announced its strategic vision “Smart Tech” in Asia1, aimed at assisting businesses and cities become more resilient in a post-pandemic world. Comprising a comprehensive suite of technologies, Smart Tech is the culmination of Canon’s innovative work in the digital dimension. It offers diverse solutions to perplexing problems, empowering businesses, and cities to be more productive and ready for the future of work.
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly altered various aspects of work, workers, and the workplace, highlighting the importance of being prepared for sudden upheavals. To be able to respond swiftly to unforeseen threats, businesses need to achieve higher levels of agility through automation. Implementing productivity-enhancing technologies in the workplace is an effective way to enable workers to work smarter in an ever-changing business environment.
“The pandemic has imparted to many the valuable lesson of cultivating genuine resilience in an uncertain world” said Norihiro Katagiri, Senior Vice President of Regional Digital Printing & Business Solution Operations, Canon Singapore. “With this hard-won knowledge at hand, businesses are now seeking innovative solutions to confidently confront and overcome new disruptions that may arise. Through Smart Tech, Canon is committed to providing businesses with the latest technologies and solutions to navigate these challenging times.”
The vision of Smart Tech is built on three pillars – Smart Workplace, Smart Vertical and Smart Surveillance.
Smart Workplace
In the post-pandemic world, businesses continue to face various challenges in managing distributed teams. From information management, process automation to workforce collaboration, Smart Workplace provides businesses with solutions to digitally transform traditional processes, and thrive in today’s blend of remote, in-office and hybrid work environments. The first step towards building a smart workplace is the digitisation of information, followed by the digitalisation of work processes.
Smart Workplace comprises information management and process automation solutions that optimise the flow of data at all levels, ensuring much-needed productivity in distributed teams. For instance, digital invoices and contracts can be easily retrieved, and automatically routed to the right recipients for timely approvals. Outstanding tasks and expiring contracts can be tracked and managed effortlessly via automated notifications. With easy information retrieval and automated workflows, Smart Workplace helps eliminate manual processes and enables workers to work from anywhere, driving seamless collaboration in the workplace.
Smart Vertical
Geopolitical disruptions and rapid technological advancements can greatly impact industries. Coupled with logistical complexity and supply chain risks, industries face a myriad of challenges including the mishandling of physical documents and falling short of regulatory compliance. With Canon’s deep industry expertise and workflow automation solutions, Smart Vertical streamlines industry-specific, complex workflows, and eliminates manual, error-prone processes to help verticals be future-ready.
For industries dealing with multiple touchpoints and partners, such as the logistics industry, overwhelming number of physical documents from different sources and time-consuming document search for audit purposes can be a laborious undertaking. Smart Vertical helps by creating visibility and accountability in digital document workflows to reduce errors, and enabling photographic evidence and e-signature capture to ensure the compliance of regulatory requirements.
Smart Surveillance
As urbanisation continues to accelerate, increased population density in cities may pose various health and safety risks, particularly during pandemics and massive public events. Smart Surveillance possesses one of the most sophisticated real-time crowd counting video analytics that promote public safety.
Through the early detection of crowd surges in densely populated areas such as entertainment centers or stadiums, Smart Surveillance can promptly alert authorities and enable rapid deployment of crowd control measures, thus preventing potential disasters. Smart Surveillance also provides benefits in commercial growth. By detecting footfall patterns of consumers in retail shops, crowd counting video analytics can help businesses analyse shopping patterns and optimise sales revenue.
In addition, Smart Surveillance allows businesses to remotely access security video footages from anywhere through cloud video surveillance. This is a significant shift from traditional on-site surveillance system access and video recordings storage, which can be costly and cumbersome. Combining advanced cloud video surveillance and data analytics, Smart Surveillance empowers urban cities and meets business security needs with remote operations that safeguard against disruptions.
Explore the Future of Work at Smart Tech Business Centre
The newly opened Smart Tech Business Centre at Canon Singapore’s office features a showcase of products and solutions under the three pillars and their practical applications across the industries, to meet customers’ needs. Through this space, visitors can experience how our solutions can help simplify business operation and enable more efficient work in various work environments.
"The pandemic has emphasised the need for businesses to be adaptable and future-ready. Through Smart Tech, Canon stands ready to equip businesses with the latest innovative solutions, enabling them to navigate and overcome new disruptions that may arise while meeting customer demands effectively. We look forward to partnering businesses to shape the future of work, as Business can be Simple with Canon." Said Vincent Low, Head of Enterprise Business, Canon Singapore.
About Canon Singapore Pte. Ltd.
Canon is a global leader in photographic and digital imaging solutions. Canon Singapore Pte. Ltd. is the headquarters for South & Southeast Asia driving sales, marketing and service strategies. Besides handling the domestic market, the company covers 22 other countries and regions including subsidiaries in India, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. The parent company Canon Inc. has a global network of more than 300 companies and employs about 180,000 people worldwide. Canon is guided by its kyosei philosophy that focuses on living and working together for the common good.
More information is available at https://sg.canon.
1 Covering Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Philippines.