Opening and keynote address - "Look to technology for the future of workplaces"

Opening and keynote address -

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Wow. The photo you saw there was the result of the Agile workplace you enjoy while you working. Uh, thank you. Thank you everyone. And, uh, uh, uh, it's my great pleasure to have you here today, uh, to this, this event to share our expertise, experiences, and how to help you to jumpstart agile job place.

Uh, in the last, I would say two, two and a half years, there are two major events that I think is very significant to change the way we work, the way, uh, we, we face our economy and businesses environment entirely. One is the, I need to put this. Pandemics, uh, pandemics have led us to change the way we work, to shift the work workplace, uh, to agile and hybrids, and it also lead us to reconsider what is the future office going to be, how it works. And a lot of business leaders are considering how to define the future or the workplace about people space, and how to integrate the technology to empower the hybrid work modes while also taking consideration of the security of Thes. The second is the world have changed. The last 12 months there were so many, uh, what would I say, uh, changes in.

The world, like international conflicts, uh, inflations or, uh, you know, climate issues, et cetera, et cetera. And, uh, including scm, supply chain management. Business leaders will need to consider many factors in term of, you know, mitigate their business decisions, the uncertainty of the situations, and also the many factors they need to consider in terms of driving their business strategy, which they bring a lot of complexity as well as what works today may not work tomorrow. There is, there is lack of clarity.

Uh, so we need to focus how to stream. , uh, mitigates streamline our processes, mitigates uh, these possible challenges in future by focusing your core domains while, uh, connected the digital end to end processes to allow you to be ready for the new challenges, the technology oh, that we have today. The reality of the changes we are facing in our businesses are changing the back practices. We have the shift in work style digitally, the information you need to assess anywhere, any place.

We are the power of the cloud and the need. Cater the cycle attacks as well as the stream workflows and automate manual processes. Uh, according to Gartner, all this business leaders have raised that. First thing is digital, the keywords. Second is how to run, end to end digitize does processes, how to jump, start to end agile workplace.

How do I know what technology to invest? How do I design my businesses? How do I free up and create meaningful work for employees so that they can focus on the domains to move forward? What is, uh, what are the best practices we have? These are the questions I encountered for many business leaders today. Uh, with our partners, we are going to share all the difference. Uh, uh, Solutions and how we can help you to jumpstart and agile workplace so that you'll be stay competitive and maximize the return of human assets.

I wanted to take this opportunity to time my partners who have worked with us to be this possible and particularly to Ms. Lee Chafe. Thank you. You're gonna share your experience, how to utilize the digitalized and the platform to improve the HR processes. Now the next question is why Rico? That I will let my colleagues, Steven Berger to share with you. Thank you very much. Hey, thank you.

I didn't get your name, but thanks. That was really good. I'm not gonna talk like him. I talk like I'm from New York, but yeah, so, um, the way I fit in, and I am living in Japan now, obviously I'm not Japanese. Um, I helped, I've been a RICO 22 years.

I helped, um, the digital transformation of, uh, Rico USA and Rico Canada. And about two years ago, um, the, our CEO of Asia Pacific said, Hey, would you be interested in moving to. And I said, where's that? No, I'm kidding.

I said, yeah, sure. Right. So, um, came to Japan and now working with Ben and all our managing directors across Asia Pacific, I'm learning so much about the world, about apac, about different cultures and so on. And I think a lot of business challenges that you folks face and other companies across the world have are all very similar. It's how we solve them and how we keep our employees motivated is kind of the key to moving forward. So, um, yeah, I gotta, we gotta figure this out somehow.

This remote, uh, which I gotta go this way right up. No, the other one up, down, up. Okay. So yeah, the first thing I wanted to start in, I, I have to, I'm sorry guys.

Can we turn on H four? I can't, uh, I can't be locked down. Um, I like to move around and so on. So the first thing I want to talk to you guys about, and I think we're about.

Half Rico, you know, Rico and you do business with us. Half of you are talking to Rico about trying to help you solve your problems. So I just put up kind of a quick chart here about RICO and, and give you some basics cuz I've been one of the luckiest RICO employees in the world. Worked in the us, worked in Japan, now servicing apac.

I've seen Rico's power across the world. It's really incredible being part of RICO and being part of the, you know, how many customers in APAC alone, we have almost 87,000 customers. So when Ben talked to you about ad, we're gonna talk to you about agile workplace.

We're gonna talk to you about process automation. We're not just telling it on behalf of apac. All the lessons learned, all the technology, all the capabilities we have across the globe are now at your disposal because you're gonna work or hopefully partner with Ricoh.

Um, been around since 1936, been a while. Um, 80,000 employees worldwide. and I'll get to, I'll talk to you later about our footprint across the globe. And I don't know, some of you might have been, might be smaller customers, some of you might be enterprise.

But once you get into the RICO ecosystem, we can support you and your business, wherever that might be across the globe. Whether it's our dealer channel partners or whether it's our direct operations, we can support you there as well. Um, engineering leadership, that's got a weird thing. Engineering leadership, we still invest a lot of our revenue into r and d and to support new developments and so on. And um, again, in 220 countries, whether that's RICO direct operations or whether that's one of you folks, I know we have a handful of our distributors and channel partners here as well.

So again, if you're new to rico, we are a powerhouse across the globe that can help you solve your problems. But thank you for coming here. I mean, C'S been, when I moved to Japan in July, I had spent six hours in the airport. Fell asleep during a Covid test waiting for the results. They yelled my name in Japanese. I didn't know they called me.

It was, you can imagine, can make a TV show outta my experience of moving to Japan. But C'S kind of were, were getting outta covid and thank you for the great turnout here today. And Ben and his team have really done a great job across the hall of showing you the technology with many of our partners that we think that with their expertise, they really can help you solve some of your business problems with your customers. Am I going the wrong way again? Ben told me in Singapore when you go up, it's down and down is up. So the remote's like reverse programmed. All right, so the other thing I wanted to talk about, I think if you know Rico, or if you knew to Rico, right? What do you think of when you hear about rico? Well, hopefully you think we're a digital services provider.

That's my job in marketing. But maybe you're not there yet, right? Maybe you think about, Hey, I know you as a print company. You know, I have your MFP devices.

I do some managed print with you guys, right? So I didn't do that. Oh, man, I need help. I run marketing, but I can't run a remote control here.

But we've done a lot. So when we looked at where we want to be, and I'm gonna talk to you about, we don't wanna be everything to every customer out there. What we really are trying to do now is talking to you, Ben talked to you about vuca, right? The world has changed beyond anyone's belief, and the path forward is not as easy as it used to be. So what we looked at is where do we wanna be with you guys? What kind of problems do we wanna solve? And then where do we not have the capabilities we need? And what this is, I'm scared to touch the point or the point, but this is a, a kind of a geography map across the world of investments we made in acquisitions. It might be a technology company, it might be a platform company, um, it might be a distribution channel if you would, but looking to, we wanna be your one stop shop, as Ben said, your integrated provider, that you come to Rico and we help you solve your problems. And if we don't have the technology, we'll recommend something for you.

But if we see it as a common occurrence in a lot of our customers and businesses, we're gonna go out and try and acquire a company to help us solve that problem. So you could see the, the map here, some of the recent ones in the us, a company called ero, and Ben and the team are gonna take you through a bunch of hybrid workplace technology that we're working with some companies here, smart and spaces and so on. But in the US they acquire the capability to solve the problem. Cybozu or kin Tone is the product big in Japan. That's a low code application platform that can help you run some basic applications to solve your business problems. Something's wrong with this thing I hit up.

Okay. It's actually down. You keep saying up and it's down. So when we look at our global customers, right? You say, okay, Steve, you know, I, I work a rico.

They're great. We've, and I've met with many of these CEOs, um, CTOs, CMOs across the globe. Ricoh is solving these customer problems. You know, many times we start off with print, but multimillion dollar projects with these big accounts, IBM out there, FedEx, Amazon, we're even partner partnering with Amazon to co-create new solutions.

You know, maybe we start, Hey, we're gonna be their print provider. That's great. We're actually being used in Amazon warehouses now to pick and choose, um, different QR code boxes, right? You, you think, I dunno, in Singapore, I'm not sure of how strong Amazon is, but in Japan I could order something in the morning and it shows up the same day. We're using RICO optics technology to help Amazon with that. So as we build relationships and, you know, all ask benefit based on some of our optic technologies and where we're going, we're creating a new innovation team to help you guys out as well.

But again, the, what would you say, the resume of Rico across the globe and in APAC is pretty overwhelming. You know, if these customers are satisfied in working with Rico, that there's no reason why we can't help you guys out with your business problems. Got it. Right. Um, so this is the kind of transition that I'm, I want to talk to you about a little bit, um, where we came from and why you should believe in Ricoh to really support us to help you solve that next problem. I mean, if you think about Ricoh and how big, how big we are in 220 countries in the operations, we had similar problems you guys did, right? But we were able to invest in technology.

We tried a lot of things. Return to work, don't return to work, get a covid shot, manage this, right? Many things didn't work. But now all the things that we figured out and learn, I mean, I was just in Ben's office. If you guys haven't been there, you should, can I invite them? You should all go.

Cuz they've created a live office environment that I wanna now move to Singapore instead of Japan. But it's really impressive and it shows our technology, we call it kind of the live office, cuz I could show you technology all day. But if you see it in use and you see how it's working in a commercial environment, that's how we think you get it where the light bulb can go off and can really. What this talks about here is the power of Rico that we are a, we have been a digital print company for 40, 50 years, if you would, but we've been spending a lot of time, like people talk about Covid and I'd love to hear some of your stories as we walk around later.

We use Covid as an opportunity to really upskill our people, train our reps, look at what technology's out there and be ready for you guys. Um, I don't know about when we used to measure market share. Market share's a very backward looking thought, right? I used to be like, Hey man, we're number one MFP market share last year, right? Well, what about next year? Well, COVID happened, our people printing as much. Uh oh. Am I gonna be number one this year? No one's printing, right? So we kind of looked at what are our customer care abouts? How do we transform Ricoh, but then use all that knowledge and focus on, we're calling it areas of expertise that we can help you folks out in your business challenges.

I keep getting confused. Got it. Right.

So when we look at this, and Ben talked to you a little bit about Gartner and some of the numbers here. Pick some data also from some Microsoft indexes and so on that based on APAC and APAC customers. I could give you all the US numbers you want, but you don't really care about that. But if you look at some of these numbers and think about it, 74% of the workers in Asia want flexible work.

I have a 21 year old daughter who's just about to graduate university. Okay. She's like, dad, I just got the job.

She got a job with pwc. I'm really excited she's gonna be off the payroll. Right? She's on her own now, right? And she said, but I could work remote. I'm like, well, what do you mean you're gonna go to New York City? You're gonna get an apartment? She's like, no, I could work for my dorm room. I'm like, no, no.

You're gonna go to the, you're too young. You gotta meet some people. But everyone's defining their own remote worker strategy. But the question I would ask you folks is, and I don't know how many of your employees are remote or not, How do you measure productivity? How do you make sure that they're focusing on what you want to focus on in your business, right? That's some of the technology that, and not even technology, but the service we can provide you that we've learned as well. You know, we have 90,000 employees.

Some of the roles very remote. Hey, if I'm working on a PowerPoint for Ben, I could do that remote. If I need to do a huddle, a workshop on some new technology, I need a whiteboard of people in the room, right? 66% of the business leaders are worried about their physical spaces.

What does that look like? What was your real estate investment prior to C, and what should your real estate investment be? After Covid, you have 50 employees. How many desks do you need every day? We have technology and a tool set that can actually help you figure that out and optimize your workspace. Look at the next one, right? Okay. Everyone's working remote Now what about your data? Who's accessing databases from their home, from the, you guys, Starbucks must be here, right? Starbucks, shake Shack. I can't believe you guys got a Shake Shack. I had three french fries for lunch.

But Starbucks, right? You work. How do you protect your company information? What do we do? Again? How do you work remotely? How do you work safely and securely? That's a lot of the stuff we're gonna talk to you today about in the, uh, in the exposition before, um, later. And some of it's from brack that says from Rico. And then you're gonna hear a lot about process automation. And I find this cuz now I'm in Japan.

I have, obviously, I don't speak too good Japanese, but process automation. What happens if, um, the woman, a man in your office, say, Sally, she processes your invoices, she's not around or she's working remote. How long does it take to get that cash to your, to your business? What if I have a process automation capability that's relatively inexpensive that can process an invoice in a day? Versus two weeks when someone owes me money. I want that money today. Toma, I owe you for dinner last night too, but, um, oh, I thought I had it. So our new value proposition are not new, but what we really are focusing now is a couple of key things.

And if you notice these things aren't technology focused, what do I wanna do for you? What do I wanna help you with? We wanna be able to simplify complexity in your business. I dunno how many of you, maybe you're in real estate. I, I met Maple Tree, right? Maybe you're in another business. I met some of the dealer partners.

We want you to focus on real estate. We want you to focus on your business. I don't want you to focus on back office as in who's working and how do I set up a meeting room? Let us help you with that.

How do you overcome obstacles in your business? Guess what? If you're having it, we already had it. How can we help you overcome that? Um, key thing in apac, I learned. Wow, living in New York, everyone's kind of the same.

Y'all. They all look like me and talk like me. Coming to apac, the diversity I have in 11 countries and the things we can learn from the different businesses, the different cultures, is really helping us provide value. You know, instead of looking at APAC as a 11 separate countries, how do I look at APAC as a region and combining all that diversity? And you'll, you'll see that later on tomorrow, today.

And then the other thing I love is this concept of hidden op op opportunities, right? So think about it this way. Um, let me go to print for a minute. So you might have a managed print solution from us, our device management. I could tell you what device prints, what, how many printed, how many Sally, how many Bob printed a day, right? What about other insights? What if I have an invoice processing system or a solution for you? And I could tell you how many invoices were processed per day.

How long it took you to get that cash, right? How do we actually uncover these opportunities in your business to let you focus on finding new customers, making your customers happy? And what we came up with is our four areas of expertise, hybrid workplace. How do we help you work in this new world of work? Um, with digital workflow and automation, you're gonna, you're gonna see a lot of focus on those two in the next, what, three hours? I dunno what time it is anymore, but, and then, uh, where we're going is cloud and IT infrastructure cuz we need the infrastructure to support those capabilities. And then when you work remote, how do we actually keep your data safe, keep your technology safe, and provide endpoint infrastructure, security and so on. So you said, Steve, you didn't mention MFP or printer once on here.

What's going on? We consider our print devices part of this hybrid workplace. Are you more concerned about a print device? Are you more concerned about the capability to print where and when you need it? So you're gonna see as, as Ben and his team start to talk to you in the future is where are you printing and what type of technology do you need? Are you printing in the cloud and you wanna release it local? Are you printing local and wanna share it? And so on and so forth. So a lot of interesting things that we're doing, but that's part of hybrid workplace. Something's going on with this remote. Okay, so, so here we are.

So Ben introduced me as the big Y Rico guy, right? And what we talked, what I like to talk about is you heard about our new areas of expert, well not new, I keep saying new, but we created a strong go to market strategy partner with a, a lot of the good partners you're gonna see today on these four areas of expertise. But the four expertise lead to which we're what we like to call our value propositions. And if you notice on this slide, There's not one piece of technology on this slide. I want, I wanna be able to talk to you about meeting solutions, digital signage. You've seen that as you walk in. Did you see the big, if you caught it every five minutes, we had a big sign downstairs in the, in the main lobby here.

You know, your business applications, how many Microsoft products are there now, do you know how to navigate which one's best for your business? Right? We can help you do that. Um, and the key thing is too, that I think is a real strong value, especially for existing customers and new, A lot of our teams, our professional services team, and our and our services folks are in your business already working with your people. So we're not just going to give you something and say, see you later, right? We're gonna help you build it.

We're gonna help deploy it. We're gonna provide advisory and design capabilities as you. You know what, maybe I'll grow something. Or maybe you need, you have a process application that we gave and you wanna add something to it, or you want a different application.

That's how we can kind of help you manage that. Again, service provider one, stop shop. And then we talk about, you know, the managing and support as well. Um, I just, we just invested in APAC to have our own network operation center, um, in the next town over in Malaysia.

But we are, you know, we used to rely on the US and Europe and Poland. We are, we see huge growth potential in Asia Pacific and we're investing in it. So now, real quick, cuz I'm probably talking too much.

I don't, I have a timekeeper here, but the, so first thing I want to talk to you a little bit about is this. The whole idea of connecting and working anywhere and, and it's, it's again, depending on your business, we probably gotta talk a little bit more and I'd love to talk to as many of you guys as I can. But, um, How are people collaborating, working together? My team is now located in Japan, Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Right. And how do you create that? Right. When what we like to kind know, if you guys close, how many people using Zoom teams, uh, what, what are the other ones out here is Zoom teams. Uh, what's this? Cisco on WebEx, right? How do you, I mean, we support this. How many of you, how long does it take to start a meeting? Joe, you there? Hey, turn your video off. Hey, mute this, right? The five minute, 10 minute meeting tax.

How do you fix that? Right? We'll show you later how some ideas that we've had that we've introduced, that meetings instant on recording the meetings, managing the AV products that you have and so on from way you can. So when we talk about hybrid workplace, we talk about a couple of key value propositions. Connecting and collaborate, which I talked to you a little bit about, right? How do I keep my employees connected? The other thing you have is you gotta worry about, and I know we have some HR folks in the room, and they're gonna be on a panel.

How do you keep your employees motivated when they're not seeing their peers, we're not seeing their bosses, right? How do we really connect them and make them feel part of a team? And we have a couple of capabilities. There is a couple of products there, but the idea is that being able to keep people connecting and come collaborating the right way. Um, spending a lot of time on the workspace management, we felt that that was key.

Think about Rico's 80,000 employees and think about the real estate footprint Ricoh has. How do we manage that workspace and optimize it? Ben, a couple years ago, did his new live office. Right.

We're going around to every RICO country and figuring out what the optimized office looks like, what technology that obviously we sell or we can sell to put in there and create a safe health working environment. The two biggest concerns coming outta C or during C were cash management at a company. And I'm sure you guys, everyone wants cash management and their health of their employees, both mental and physical, right? So that's what we focused our efforts on. If we're in one out of every three businesses in the world from a print solution, why can't we actually now take over their meeting spaces, take over their communication.

So our, our value props aren't just, Hey Steve, I'm gonna make cars next week. It's actually tied to business and tied to the office. And then last where we, we, we've lived and breathed our smart devices, but these devices are changing too. Um, RICO has 3D imaging technology now we have, um, I see RFP is printer products, but we're also changing the way we go to market and business with that. So, you know what? Maybe an upfront investment or an MFP isn't ideal.

What if I can treat that business differently? Offer you a print subscription and so on. So prints becoming part of our value prop, not the lead product to sell. I dunno, I'm literally guessing every time I hit a button and it said something's wrong with this thing.

So Ben also talked to you about automating solutions and workflow, and I think this is, you can, you'll see, um, some technology and actually real use cases. You can hear about it later. I think there's an hr, um, talking about it too. We've invested, we've actually acquired companies.

Might have heard of DocuWare, you might have heard of, um, Kento I talked about before. We're partnering with a company called Out Systems. You're gonna see later today all to build applications and workflow. To solve your business challenges.

Now, you could say, Steve, I, I can't afford that stuff. That's for the enterprise account. You know what? We can make a low-code app that could solve a very small, even a micro customer's problem.

So, you know, talk to us about those problems. We're interested too, because guess what? If you have that problem, other customers can have that problem. And I wanna go in and be that one stop shop for everybody. . This is, this is comical. Um, so when you talk about the digital workflow and automation, again, I'm tr we're trying to define, I don't wanna just give you a technology pitch, right? But we wanna look at how you manage managing your content and your workflow. Think, think about this.

A great example, my boss says, Steve, you know what? I'm doing a presentation for apac. I need that slide on market share in Singapore. You know you have it. How long it take you to find it? You're looking through PowerPoints, helping things up, like, man, I remember that, right? How do I manage content? Now? What if it's an invoice? What if it's a job application? Those are real critical, right? Capabilities that we can to manage that content, find it, index it as it gets ingested, so then you can find it and use it at any time. And you know what, now people need to access it anywhere.

It's gotta be securely in the cloud. And if I'm working outta my house in Japan and my, my counterpart in Australia needs it, how do they access it? Right? Process automation. How do we actually understand your processes, map it to something that's tangible and then solve, we not, might not always solve the problem without you. We need to work together to solve that problem.

How do we do that? And then I call this navigating the waters of the business applications. Google business applications. There's hundreds, thousands, if you would, right? But based on best practices that we've had with our customers, how can we help you? Kind of navigate through that and, and work with you.

So you don't buy a, a tool set that you don't need, right? You wanna buy this tool set so you can optimize it. I mean, I'm a, I'm a, let's say a Photoshop user. I probably use 2% of that whole program. Do I need Photoshop? Can I get gim from, I'm going deep. Sorry.

Can I get a shareware program that can edit my images? Good enough, probably right sizing the technology for your business as well. And then the last part where we're going and we have different, I told you we're building an operation center in Malaysia, is this infrastructure piece in cybersecurity. If I wanna be that one stop shop for you guys, um, we need to do this for you guys. And, and that's We missed it.

I hadn't, I guess one of the slides isn't here. But anyway, we have a, again, two or three value propositions based on network infrastructure, cyber security, um, even offering devices as a service. Now, again, you could say why Rico? Because think about it. If I'm, I'm able to support your print needs. If I'm able to support your hybrid workplace needs, I can support your cloud and IT and cyber security needs as well. So I think if I can go the right way, I think that, so here's what I ask and then I'll get off.

But Ben and the team have planned a really great day for you guys. We got customers on a panel. They, their office is empty cuz all the technologies here. But what I'd like you to do is, and talk to Eureka team. You know, think what I just talked about. Think about your business challenges today.

You know, talk to us about it. Maybe we have another customer, almost a peer that had the same challenges and we can help you solve that problem. Right. Think about your workplace. Do people wanna come to the office? Is it cool enough? Can they collaborate? You know, do we, you still have meeting rooms and assigned desks? Well, maybe it's time to rethink that a little bit and create more motivation with your employees, right? Um, then what we, we also talk about, I talked a lot about you and your business, but what about your end user customer? The same as I can increase your process. Your customers are at the end of your process too.

We talk to hospitals. I dunno how many healthcare companies are here if I can, what does a patient really care about in the hospital? They don't wanna sit around and wait for hours, right? They want the best healthcare they have and they don't want a big bill. I don't how you heal into medicine in Singapore, but in the US healthcare's insane, right? How do I solve that? Can I do a better patient entry system? Can I get better claims management? Right? That all helps that patient experience in the healthcare world. And then, There's a lot of government regulations out to esp. Least think about it and security and some of your challenges there that we can help you with to focus on your business. So that's all I got.

Thank you for your time today. Thanks for coming. And I'm around if anyone wants to talk later on. So thank you.

2022-12-07 18:56

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