Customizing Your MFP

Toshiba’s newest Office Collection Multifunction products (MFPS) are not just the most productive ever produced, but they’re actually fun too.

I know what you’re saying “Fun? Really Robert? I think you’ve inhaled too much toner.” But yes, they really are fun, in much the same way playing with your cellphone is fun.

You can customize the background image, add apps to improve productivity, and even set defaults to suit your preferences. There are countless ways to make it work just for you. Let’s take a few minutes and explore some of the easy customizations you can use to make your MFP work for you in ways you’ve probably never imagined.

Elevate Your MFP Experience

Elevate is Toshiba’s unique approach to simplifying the interface experience for the average user who doesn’t want to master programming their copier.

Through a consultative approach between the account executive (AE) and the client, Elevate allows the user to customize the MFP’s User Interface (UI) to suit their specific needs. Beginning with what you first see, the background image can be personalized to reflect your business including your logo and more.

During the Elevate consultation, the AE seeks to identify routine tasks that users perform on their MFP and bring those front and center with one-touch access. This approach lets users focus on their core occupation and not get bogged down fumbling through the user interface. It’s a proven approach that minimizes MFP-related user mistakes and improves productivity.

Let’s Get Personal

For the true tech geek though, (you know, those of us that customize their cellphones just a little more than the average user) Toshiba’s office collection will entertain them like Barney re-runs do for a crying baby.

Let’s start with customizing the background image. Find a photo candidate. You’ll need to size the image to 1024 x 600 pixels and save it as a PNG file.

When selecting your image consider you won’t want your buttons or button label text to get lost in the imagery, so a simple image is better.  You can change label text color help with this.

Once you have a background image and have sized it and saved it as a PNG onto a thumb drive, plug the drive into the MFP’s front panel USB port and select the Settings button. You’ll need admin rights to do this – I’m sure you can imagine what could go wrong if that wasn’t the case. Choose Edit Background Image and Import your image.

You’re not done yet.

Now, go to the Background Image (not to be confused with Edit Background Image) and select your newly imported image. Exit out and take a look.

Go back into the Settings button and adjust the font color if necessary. Again, some images may make it too hard to see the buttons or read the labels. You can decide what you can accept.

You can apply this same trick to the buttons (icons) themselves. In this case the image size is only 154 x 102 pixels. I don’t recommend changing the graphics for the default app buttons (Copy, Scan, Fax, Counter etc.) but when you start creating your own template shortcuts, this might make sense. Changing the picture associated with a given button (icon) is done from the Settings as well.

Streamlining Workflow – Templates & Shortcuts

Changing the background image is fun, but streamlining your workflow and thus improving productivity can really affect your bottom line and make a bigger impact. Templates are the way to do this.

Think of templates as job memory on steroids. Templates allow users to store complex multi-step copying, scanning or faxing tasks as one-touch buttons.

This is ideal for repetitive tasks. It saves the user from having to remember how to program the job each time and eliminates the possibility of errors or forgetting one of the steps.

For example, let’s say every week the office administrator needs to scan and send a sales report to all of the regional offices. It needs to be scanned in color, they’re two-sided originals, and the PDF needs to go to the same group of 20 people every week. Store this in a template and set the MFP so it automatically starts the document feeder the moment the template button is pressed.  Label the template “Sales Report.”

Another example is a healthcare facility that has to copy insurance ID cards and place them in the patient records file. It’s important that they enlarge the copies slightly as reading the patient information has been a problem in the past. They can simply use the ID Card Copy feature and crank up the zoom to about 148%. Once you have something that works, register that as a template. Now every time they need to copy a patient ID card they just locate and press that template.

Templates are great, certainly easier than remembering all the steps, recipients etc., every time you do the same repetitive task.

You can take this a step further to really simplify things. If there is a task you perform often enough, you can throw that on the main screen with the same prominence as the Copy or Scan buttons. Doing this is really simple.

Start by making a test press of that template button and make sure it does what you want it to do. If not, adjust accordingly. This is a critical step for adding the button to the front panel.

Now go into the Settings button and select Button Contents from the dropdown list. Then select the plus (+) sign of one of the unused buttons and select Register from Job History and that job will be at the top of the list (remember the test run you just did?). Name the button and choose the icon and you’re good to go. In this same menu you can add a custom-made button label (icon).

I hope I got you a little excited to go customize your MFP and make it not just look a little better, but help you be more productive too. The more time you spend exploring this area, the easier it will get and pretty soon you won’t be satisfied without customizing the front panel and buttons and creating short cuts for anything you think you’ll do more than once.

This is just the beginning of how you can customize your Toshiba MFP to really suit your needs. To learn more about this contact your local Toshiba representative.