By Andy Slawetsky – Canon kicked off a five-city road show this week at their HQ in Melville, NY. Over 60 attendees from 24 dealers across the US attended this event to find out What’s Happenin’ with Canon. Besides this event in NY, this road show also visit Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and Irvine CA.

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The program began with Director Tom O’Neill giving an overview on Canon. The Americas grew in every channel last year. “Our goal is to be number one in color,” he told listeners. I was impressed with Canon’s commitment to R&D as Tom mentioned Canon spends over 9% of annual revenue to keep their products competitive and innovative.

As one of the largest annual patent holder every year, Canon is always improving. A lot of companies in this industry could take some notes from Canon’s approach. Continually cutting R&D over the years has left some competitors at a significant disadvantage. Not so with Canon.

After Tom, featured guest speaker Ed Crowley gave a very interesting presentation on managed print, where it’s going, challenges and opportunities for dealers. I heard several dealers behind me agreeing with many of Ed’s statements throughout his discussion.

“MPS is about solutions. It’s about solving customer’s problems,” Ed told listeners. He then highlighted many of Canon’s strengths as compared to the industry in general. “Canon has an infrastructure that’s pretty incredible,” Ed told the audience. Ed will be giving this presentation at all of the road show events over the next several weeks. Definitely worth sitting through if you can make one of these events.

After the opening session, we split into smaller groups for presentations on workflow, HR onboarding, an overview on the new imageRUNNER ADVANCE platform and selling to healthcare and legal customers. The session I sat through covered the strengths of uniFLOW and Therefore as well as imagRUNNER ADVANCE Desktop.

At the end of the day, attendees returned to the hotel for some team building and dinner. I’m not normally a fan of team building programs but this one was great and you can see from the smiles in my pictures people were having a really good time.

Day two began with more smaller sessions:

• imageRUNNER ADVANCE Competitive Overview
• Streamlining Processes in Financial Services and Manufacturing
• Solving the Purchase to Pay Workflow
• Leveraging Remote Services During the Sales Cycle
• Canon’s Managed Services
• Enterprise Solutions Sales Tools and Resources

Attendees were paying attention in these sessions and very few people were looking at their mobile devices – a telling sign that they were interested and engaged. It helped that the topics were relevant and the sessions were only 50-minutes long.

The Enterprise Tools session was pretty cool. Product configurators help sales reps put together devices, providing suggestions, product option descriptions and more. I particularly liked the comparative energy consumption tool that allows sales reps to compare Canon power consumption to competitors.

Solved is another that makes it easy to find, locate and share content and information on a variety of topics like output management, device management, etc. Canon has a growing number of tools like these that will help their dealers’  sales forces win deals.

I have covered Canon for over 20 years now (really???). In that time they have been one of the more challenging companies to write about, not because they had nothing to say, but because they have been so closed to the press and analysts.

I was told earlier this year that this was a “new Canon” and that their approach was going to change. I was skeptical. However, after my third trip to Canon events in the last three months, it’s clear that Canon HAS changed and it’s very refreshing.

When I met Toyo Kuwamura at a Canon Solutions America event a couple of months ago, he told me Canon was going to be more forthcoming with information and since his promotion to SVP and GM of the Business Imaging Solutions Group, the change has been noticeable and appreciated. Coincidence?

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This road show is a great example of Canon’s commitment to bringing the word to the streets. Events like this are a great way to show dealers what they’re working on, how to position Canon’s competitive advantages and how/why imaging dealers need to get on board with workflow solutions like uniFLOW and others.

These events are strategically located and if you have the time (and an invite), I highly recommend attending one in your region.

~Andy