Tokyo, London and New York - In a global event, held in Tokyo, London & New York, Ricoh Company, Ltd., a worldwide leader in digital office equipment and advanced document management solutions and services, today announced an investment designed to aggressively accelerate its shift to a services business model as a key growth strategy, building upon its core foundation of industry-leading hardware and software technologies and document and IT-related services. To advance this shift, Ricoh plans to invest $300 million USD over three years in its global Managed Document Services (MDS) infrastructure, underscoring the company's commitment to its continued partnership with its customers, helping them to grow their bottom line through effective document management, improved workflow and increased productivity.

New Research Reveals C-Suite Mistakenly Believes
Document-Related Costs are Insignificant

Based on research from industry analyst firm IDC and Ricoh MDS engagements, a company with annual revenue of $250 million USD can save more than $6 million USD annually through effective document management, according to Angele Boyd, IDC Group VP, General Manager, Imaging/Output Document Solutions & SMB. This includes savings of 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.

Ricoh also unveiled new research from a series of global focus groups and surveys with C-suite executives and senior IT managers. The research, conducted in partnership with IDC, found that while businesses are aware that they need to gain more insight into their information and document workflows, they continue to have little understanding of the specific amount of money spent in this area. This is largely attributed to the lack of consolidation of both observed and unobserved costs and fragmented distribution of these costs across different departments within the organization.

In addition, there is low awareness among executives of the positive impact a document management strategy could have on the business, including how much could be saved and the overall impact on the bottom line.

Harnessing the power of information contained in documents and processes as a core company asset is critical since the way organizations communicate and conduct business is changing at an unprecedented pace. Ricoh's 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.

"Ricoh recognizes that global workforce trends, new technologies and the economy are transforming the way our customers must approach document management. It is now a key priority for CIOs to ensure their organizations are ready to meet the challenges brought by these forces," said Mr. Shiro Kondo, President and CEO, Ricoh Company, Ltd. "Therefore, we are making additional investments to help lead our customers in the implementation of secure information infrastructure solutions that help them to become more agile, responsive and productive. Through our on-site and off-site support, we help our customers stay focused on revenue-generating activities, while we do what we do best - optimize workflows."

A Holistic Approach

Ricoh's investment in its global MDS infrastructure is designed to strengthen its best practices approach and technologies across its global footprint and help the company achieve an annual MDS revenue target of $3.3 billion USD by FY2013.

Investments will focus on reinforcing Ricoh's key strengths and leadership including:
- Enhancing Ricoh's adaptive customer-focused approach, in which Ricoh partners with businesses to help them meet their goals. This approach includes development of Ricoh's global change management professional services offering, based upon Prosci's ADKAR® change management methodology, which is designed to help employees permanently change costly document-related behaviors. In addition, Ricoh has globally adopted the ITIL® services delivery framework, which is the most widely used approach to IT services management. Ricoh is also increasing the number of services teams professionally certified in the ITIL® and the ADKAR® methodologies.
- Improving Ricoh's holistic, vendor-agnostic approach to information, infrastructure and process management. This approach allows Ricoh to manage a company's entire fleet, regardless of manufacturer. This holistic approach will be further enhanced as Ricoh accelerates the delivery of a suite of cloud-type tools for device and print management, optimization and decision support.
- Broadening Ricoh's global MDS workforce as well as globally standardizing its sales and services training. This is critical to maintaining a globally consistent approach to services delivery, regardless of where the customer's offices are located. Ricoh has one of the industry's largest direct sales and services organizations, which currently includes 30,000 services professionals.

Ricoh has delivered custom MDS solutions to customers around the world. For customer success stories and testimonials on Ricoh's MDS approach, please click here.