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Office

Providing diverse value to drive a work evolution

Materializing greater efficiency and productivity and supporting business processes and work practice reforms.

Katsunori Nakata

Office Printing Business

Katsunori Nakata

Corporate Senior Vice President,
General Manager of Office Printing Business Group,
Ricoh Co., Ltd.

Strategic direction: Office Printing

This core business focuses on imaging equipment. Here, we continue to deploy earnings-centric strategies and enhance profitability through selection and concentration with products, sales channels, and regions. We will bolster solutions that bring together cloud collaboration and software that help customers reform workstyle innovation and drive productivity innovations.

Sales

Office Printing sales

Yasuyuki Nomizu

Platform Business

Yasuyuki Nomizu

Corporate Senior Vice President,
General Manager of Platform Business Group, Ricoh Co., Ltd.

Strategic direction: Office Services

We will accelerate business growth by globally deploying successful models and creating new value by harnessing RICOH Smart Integration (RSI). We will expand business areas by investing extensively in digital businesses, cultivating partner strategies, and developing IoT devices.

Sales

Office Services Sales

Providing value to society: Office Printing/Office Services

We will automate corporate business workflows and cut labor costs so customers can improve productivity and secure more time to create new knowledge.

Office Printing

Office Services

Business environment and growth areas

Working spaces for our customers today increasingly extend well beyond conventional offices. The Ricoh Group accordingly formulated its EMPOWERING DIGITAL WORKPLACES value proposition to help people work smarter. We are developing businesses in the Office Printing and Office Services domains.
In recent years, large corporate customers have explored the deployment of Software as a Service cloud and mobile services that support remote work in the process of rolling out productivity-enhancing equipment, reforming work practices, and catering to diverse workstyles. The priority for small and medium-sized enterprises customers is to increase work efficiency and security by digitizing traditionally paper-based workflows. The Ricoh Group has responded to such trends by developing MFPs that function well with cloud and mobile services. It has also created such office equipment and integrated platforms as RICOH Interactive Whiteboards (IWB) and the RICOH Unified Communication System (RICOH UCS). Customers can draw on RSI, which enables them to connect the Ricoh Group and partner devices, and monthly subscriptions that give them access to the latest services while minimizing initial investments.
We improve customer convenience through @Remote, which we offer around the globe to remotely assess the usage and operational states of equipment online. It also orders supplies and arranges maintenance without customers needing to contact Ricoh. We are endeavoring to further reduce downtimes by analyzing equipment data and by providing predictive maintenance and support before failures occur.
From the year ended March 31, 2019, we began investing in business expansion, notably through collaborations in digital business areas, and are pushing ahead with capital and business alliances. We are proposing ways for customers to transform document- and communications-related business processes beyond traditional frameworks for improving internal business productivity.

Supporting workflows with advanced MFPs

In January 2019, we rolled out the RICOH IM C series of advanced MFPs, which draw on state-of-the-art cloud services and AI to automate work processes and cut labor costs by digitizing documents. Customers can use large touch panels to access cloud services and select and install the applications they need. We offer services that save scanned and PC documents to private clouds for easier viewing and sharing. Other services simplify data sharing with projectors, IWB, smartphones, tablets, and other devices. MFPs function as hubs. They help small and medium-sized enterprises increase their use information technology by offering easy access to cloud services. In providing solutions that foster organizational productivity innovations by combining a range of cloud services through advanced MFPs and the RSI cloud platform, we help these customers transform their business processes.
RICOH IM C6000
RICOH IM C6000

Tailoring Office Services to local needs

We offer Office Services that cater to local needs the world over. We set up the Service Operations Centre in Warsaw as part of that approach in 2017. This facility enables us to remotely monitor customer networks and applications for customers around Europe and provide managed services for outsourcing IT infrastructure and assets operations. In Communication Services, customers visit Ricoh Europe Holdings PLC, our European headquarters, to immerse themselves in work practice reforms and get assistance in resolving their issues.
In the United States, we provide document-related outsourcing services, primarily for large corporations. We propose optimal document services, improving operational efficiency and adding value.
In Japan, we offer Scrum packages. These solutions resolve issues in the construction, real estate, and five other sectors by enhancing common work practice reforms, security, and back office tasks.
Our partner programs encompass strengthening collaboration with information and communication equipment manufacturers, application vendors, and other entities. By drawing on the strengths of partners knowledgeable about specific industries and business issues and the capabilities of the Ricoh Group, we can strengthen tailored solutions development. This helps customers to automate worksite and office operations and cut labor costs. We can also contribute to customer productivity reforms, centered on small and medium-sized enterprises. We plan to expand our partner programs worldwide in the years ahead.
Tailoring Office Services to local needs

Collaborating

We are collaborating with partners to enhance the value customers get from working smarter. In July 2018, we started working with two startup companies in that regard. They are speech recognition firm Hmcomm Inc. and hands-free communication device company BONX Inc. We are leveraging our customer ties to expand sales through solutions that draw on Hmcomm’s Deep Learning-based speech recognition AI and through communication tools that combine the proprietary BONX Grip headset and smartphone apps. We are incorporating these technologies in our IWB and other edge devices to help customers overhaul work practices.
In October 2018, we acquired all the issued and outstanding shares of MakeLeaps Corporation, an online quoting and invoicing system, to help streamline business-to-business transactions. Down the track, we plan to integrate MakeLeaps with Ricoh MFPs and customer management, accounting, and sales management systems from various vendors to further support the digitization of in-house workflows and inter-company transactions.

Connecting offices and frontline sites and transforming business processes

In May 2019, we launched RICOH Unified Communication System (UCS) 360 VR Live, a multi-site interactive communication system that allows users to share site spaces with remote locations. This setup combines the RICOH UCS video and web conferencing system with the RICOH THETA 360° still and video camera and links in real time to specialized equipment, smartphones, and PCs to distribute 360° images. Because there is no need to install dedicated lines or multipoint control units, RICOH THETA cameras can be installed at sites and connected to RICOH UCS 360 VR Live to show what is happening. Viewers can change views with their devices and zoom in and out. Offices, shops, plants, classrooms, hospitals, construction sites, and accident and disaster sites can swiftly connect to enable support from remote locations.
RICOH UCS 360 VR Live helps customers transform workflows by linking applications and such edge devices as advanced MFPs, RICOH IM C series, IWBs, the RICOH UCS, and the RICOH THETA, through a cloud platform.
RICOH Unified Communication System 360 VR Live setup
RICOH Unified Communication System 360 VR Live setup

Solutions success stories

Providing platforms for people to work smarter

We develop and provide platforms to expand new value to customers. We support productivity innovation in various industries and operations through these platforms.

• Office document management

In offices, data scanned by scanning machines, MFPs, and other devices can be automatically identified through optical character recognition, for distribution and registration in business card, document, and accounting information systems. A good example of such a setup is invoices that use AI to automatically recognize information and register it in accounts systems. This automates tasks that have been traditionally time-consuming and labor-intensive, alleviating systems input workloads or eliminating tasks.

• Acquiring and sharing information from eldercare and welfare sites

Eldercare and welfare sites can acquire information from sensors installed on beds to provide real-time information to caregivers on patients leaving their beds or on their statuses in beds. Patient activity histories, vital signs, and weight changes are converted to suitable data formats and automatically registered in eldercare systems.
Access to real-time information alleviates caregiver workloads by making it possible to patrol areas less frequently while reducing numbers of near-miss incidents. Another benefit is that automated inputting into eldercare systems is labor-saving, enabling caregivers to focus better on their work.

• Service industry communications

In restaurants and other service businesses, servers wearing headset microphones can simply state customer orders. Voice recognition software automatically converts this information to text for real-time display on electronic whiteboards in kitchens. Order information can be converted into suitable data formats for sales management systems, tabulated, and automatically registered. Invoices, accounts, and payments can be automated and employed in accounting systems.
Innovations in communication between employees and automation and labor savings for servers frees everyone to focus on building caring customer satisfaction.

Feedback from developer using platform

This platform empowers us to provide solutions delivering new synergies

PFU sells image scanners worldwide and offers optical character recognition and other operational improvements for documents. A great attraction of this platform is that it is easy to combine a range of components to create business flows. With components being prepared on the platform, you can develop business flows in a few hours, one example being to save image scanned data to cloud services. We developed links with PFU image scanners, and completion after receiving specifications was around seven days. Also, partners can add components themselves, so we can provide solutions with brand new synergies when selecting customized components. All companies have solid strengths, not just PFU, and I would like to integrate them to deliver new customer value.

Yu Okuno Yu Okuno
Planning Department
Business Promotion Division
Imaging Business Group
PFU Limited