Johannesburg, 05 Aug 2014
Ricoh SA has launched its managed document services (MDS) division locally as it accelerates its shift to a services business model as a key growth strategy.
Effective document management saves companies potentially millions of rands while also furnishing them the opportunity to grow their revenues.
"The savings and growth opportunities include observed costs, such as printing, as well as unobserved costs connected to IT support, documents and records management, environmental, regulatory compliance and end-user productivity," says Richard Pinker, MD of Ricoh SA. "In the past three years, during which Ricoh globally has invested more than $300 million in MDS infrastructure, Ricoh's MDS services offering has matured based on numerous international, as well as local, implementations."
Sharon Reid, who leads the new division, says Ricoh's development and implementation model is a development of the industry-standard Prosci's ADKAR and ITIL methodologies. It incorporates five key pillars: understand, improve, transform, govern and optimise. Those sit above an organisational change management layer that itself rides two components in a third layer: project and service management. Delving deeper, Ricoh's methodology considers eight further aspects: environment, output, process and change management, services, optimisation, security and remote management, vendor and consumables management, asset management and service desk integration.
The strategic integration of mobile computing with back-end systems and data analysis will have a profound impact on the majority of organisations and their business processes. Acceleration of intelligent workers (iWorkers) may be connected to the growing consequences of ineffective information sharing. When asked to rank the areas that have been impacted the most, business leaders cited lost revenues in first place (49%), followed by lost customers (43%) and a lack of customer insight (27%) in third, according to research by Coleman-Parkes conducted on behalf of Ricoh.
"Harnessing the power of information contained in documents and processes as a core company asset is critical since the way organisations communicate and conduct business is changing at an unprecedented pace," says Reid. "Our accelerated shift to services, with a strong focus on MDS, will help customers to become more responsive to the continual flow of information as they address the changes in their industries."
"Global workforce trends, new technologies and the economy are transforming the way our customers must approach document management," she says. "CIOs have to know their businesses are ready to meet the challenges they present, which is why we have invested in secure information infrastructure solutions that help their businesses to become more agile, responsive and productive. Our onsite and off-site support keeps them focused on revenue-generating activities while we optimise the flow of information."
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