TOKYO, LONDON and NEW YORK – In a global event, held in Tokyo, London and New York, Ricoh Company, Ltd. 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.

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.