Patent ID: 8694143

Claim:
A management apparatus for managing a flow of linked jobs to be executed by a plurality of devices comprising at least one multifunctional peripheral connected to a network, wherein the at least one multifunctional peripheral comprises: a system controller; a scanner operatively connected to the system controller; an input image processor operatively connected to the scanner and to the system controller; a network interface operatively connected to the system controller and to the network; an output image processor operatively connected to the system controller; a print engine operatively connected to the output image processor; a memory operatively connected to the input image processor, the system controller, and the output image processor; a storage device which has one or more flows stored therein and is operatively connected to the system controller; a detector which detects an improvement of performance in an existing function of one or more of the devices, wherein the performance of said function by the device is already included in one of said one or more flows-stored in said storage device; a corrector which automatically corrects said one of the one or more flows stored in said storage device to include the improvement of performance in function detected by said detector to form a corrected flow; an estimator which confirms each corrected flow is executable with a current job scenario being managed by the management apparatus and the changed function, estimates a plurality of advantages for each executable corrected flow over said at least one flow stored in said storage device, and associates the plurality of estimated advantages with the executable corrected flow; wherein said storage device stores the corrected flow; and wherein at least one of the advantages is an improvement of an average processing time and an average wait time, and another of the advantages is an improvement of quality of an output product or an improvement of user's convenience.