By Craig Lewis, Head of Enterprise Printing, Commercial and Industrial Printing Group, Ricoh Europe
COVID-19 required businesses to make sweeping operational changes overnight with most implementing immediate homeworking.
Print Rooms or Corporate Reprographic Departments (CRDs) were no exception. They had to quickly assess what was needed to support their organisation, addressing remote user needs, improving accessibility to print and document workflows and generally offering more services to ensure business continuity.
Initially Ricoh revisited its software solutions designed to support the progression of digital transformation journeys. They were created to help operations work smarter, streamline processes and change to meet new needs.
They were further developed to address the changing work landscape which often dovetailed with the desire for businesses to accelerate their digital transformation.
The result is Ricoh’s Work Together, Anywhere solutions for the Print Room, that deliver benefits including helping business continuity, maintaining vital customer communications and greater control of costs.
This is achieved through a suite of solutions that support responsive, agile and secure homeworking. It helps manage key areas of change efficiently, securely and cost effectively. It responds to immediate changes as well as the long term impact on the way day to day business processes or customer communications are completed.
The main business benefits include:
· Maintaining communications and controlling mail costs with Hybrid Mail. It enables staff to create structured and ad-hoc customer mail for centralised printing.
· Enabling easy, secure and cost efficient printing with Centralised Print Submission that connects users to centralised printing services.
· Making documents and data more accessible with Business Document Connect that provides the ability to connect to business system documents remotely.
With so many staff working at home at the moment, improving centralised print submission workflow not only enables better services for staff but also helps to avoid uncontrolled external printing costs, while keeping documents and data secure in-house.
We have also seen a growing requirement to automate mailing workflows, enabling staff to continue to generate and process customer correspondence at a time where mailings have once again been a reliable method to maintain customer service and experience. Hybrid Mail automates and centralises the printing, but also enables mail digitisation, providing further time and cost savings.
But digitisation of mail is just one area that can help with efficiency. We are also working with organisations to help them transform transactional processes to electronic, multichannel delivery workflows – even incorporating mobile based forms to complete remote transactions that trigger fast, automated invoicing.
Are you ready to accommodate the new normal? What further capabilities could you introduce to enable the most effective homeworking that safeguards the wellbeing of both your operation and your employees? Where can your organisation make significant enhancements?
Our skilled team of experts can offer an online consultation to identify areas where you can make significant improvements and efficiencies in your print and document processes.
www.ricoh-europe.com
