Toshiba Business Solutions Featured Supplier
An interview with: Joe Lemoine and JoAnn Paugh Vice President / General Manager and Western Region Business Development Manager
Tell us about Toshiba Business Solutions.
Toshiba Business Solutions is a global leader in office solutions, powered by local offices. We help improve workflow by printing smarter, working more secure, and increasing communication and efficiency. With more than 200,000 employees and over $63 billion in annual sales, Toshiba’s business model has been in place for 140 years. In fact, we take 5% of our annual revenue and put it back into research and development. Reinvesting in our brand has helped us create industry-leading digital imaging products.
Even though Toshiba is a global company, we are available to our clients through our many local offices. This means our customers have access to the latest technology a company our size can provide while still receiving the support they need near by.
Toshiba is considered a trusted name in office equipment and document solutions. In fact, we have amassed over 200 industry awards and product recommendations, including being a 14-time “BTA Channel’s Choice Superior Performance” award recipient and an 8-time winner of Marketing Research Consultant’s “Copier Manufacturer of the Year” award.
What is Toshiba’s mission statement?

Understanding your business is our business. Smarter. Faster. Safer. Greener. Toshiba’s experts will customize solutions to meet your needs and manage it all, from paper to digital, in all kinds of businesses. Our people are focused on helping companies increase the value of their ideas. We want to help you maximize your productivity in whatever way is best for your business. Whatever your industry, we can help, be it financial, corporate, healthcare, education, manufacturing, retail or legal.
What is your perspective on the future of the copier industry?
The use of copiers is continuing to decline, but print volume is on the rise. Our core business has shifted from basic copiers and printers to multi-function devices. People need equipment that does more: from scanning, faxing and printing to built-in software and hard drives that function as a mini-computer. The increased functionality of devices is amazing and has become an integral part of how people do business. For example, documents needed for a presentation can either be printed or viewed onscreen, immediately edited, archived and saved to a server or the cloud.
We consider multi-functional devices to be an on-ramp to your business solutions. Customers need more than the equipment, they need document management solutions.
What are other trends you are noticing?
We focus on equipment plus solutions.

What is Toshiba’s main focus?
The shift to electronic documents and how those are shared within and outside your company. The cloud has had a big impact. Internally, documents can now be routed digitally to the appropriate person instead of printing and delivering a hard copy.
“We sell the total solution.”
JoAnn Paugh, Toshiba, Western Region Business Development Manger
Who is your ideal customer?
We want to help a 1-man office all the way up to a Fortune 100 company. We cover the full gamut.
What do you want customers to understand about Toshiba?
We offer products that fit ALL needs. Whether you are a home business, or you have multiple employees, located in the U.S. or around the world, we have solutions to fit anyone’s budget and business model. Since meeting our customer’s needs is so very important to us, we have developed strategic partnerships with Lexmark, HP, KIP and Riso to help our clients. We not only share market space with these major corporations, but we are also a distributor of their products to provide a complete business solution to all that we serve. This goes back to Toshiba providing the total solution. Because Toshiba wants to give a client what works, our customers can get the product they need in addition to Toshiba products. We also have over 100 software partnerships that help clients meet their business objectives.
“Our sales force assesses your pains and makes recommendations for a complete office management solution. ”
Joe Lemoine, Toshiba, Vice President and General Manager
What do potential customers want to know?

We offer rentals, leases, and sales, but about 98% of our clients purchase or lease equipment. It really depends on the size of the company as to whether you want to lease or buy. Smaller businesses are always concerned with price. What we want customers to know is that we have a product that can meet your budgetary needs. For example, we sell printers from as low as $500 all the way up to $100,000. Most of the time a customer will describe a concern or issue and want to know if we have something that can help them. If they can tell us what their needs are, then we can offer a solution that will positively impact their business.
Another question we are seeing is: How can we archive and retrieve our own documents. Customers are very interested in document management technology.
What features are important to your customers?
For each customer, different features are important: quality, color, scanning, archiving, and reliability. But, service is everything!
“Everyone has the bells and whistles. It’s what value are YOU going to add to this product for your customer? ”
JoAnn Paugh, Toshiba, Western Region Business Development Manger
What sets Toshiba’s customer service apart?
Everyone wants to have great customer service and every customer is unique. To be able to provide factory trained technicians means that we can easily fix OEM parts, and we can back our products and service with our manufacturer’s guarantee. If your equipment fails or just doesn’t perform optimally, then Toshiba will give you a like to like replacement.
Our local branches provide quick response time – usually about 2 hours.