Accelerating Digital Transformation

Originally published at: https://www.zuora.com/

Ricoh Selects Zuora to Accelerate the Global Expansion of Its New Digital Workplace Productivity Solutions

Zuora, Inc. has announced that Ricoh has selected Zuora to help advance its digital transformation initiatives and to continually improve the customer experience. The Zuora® platform will power and manage all financial processes for Ricoh’s first subscription-based printing and document workflow service.

“Leveraging the subscription business model changes how our customers interact with and continually receive value from our devices. This is a fundamental shift and we are excited to partner with Zuora to expand the Ricoh Smart Integration B2B cloud platform,” said Yasuyuki Nomizu, Corporate Vice President, Ricoh. “We chose Zuora because of their proven track record in powering subscription-based business models, which is required to launch our new Dynamic Workplace Intelligence approach to the market.”

First movers who embrace the increasing momentum of digitization can turn it into a competitive advantage. McKinsey & Company “found that the three-year revenue growth (of over 12 percent) for the fleetest was nearly twice that of companies playing it safe with average reactions to digital competition”

Ricoh’s new approach increases workplace efficiency and lowers the barrier to entry for small and medium-sized businesses. Incorporating a cloud platform into the RICOH IM Series takes the company’s best-of-breed multifunction printers (MFPs) and adds a cloud-based document workflow platform to enhance it, empowering digital workplaces and giving their customers access to sophisticated equipment to help them work smarter.

The new RICOH IM Series leverages artificial intelligence while digitizing various documents that occur daily in business transactions and in-house operations including ordering, invoicing, printing, mailing, to make these workflow processes and transactions paperless.

“With Ricoh Smart Integration, we have integrated a range of applications provided by partners in addition to Ricoh’s own application suite. Customers are able to utilize the latest release of cloud services based on a subscription model to reform their business,” said Kazuhiro Horiba, head of the RSI Office in Platform Management Center of Ricoh’s Platform Management Group. “At Ricoh, as well as meeting the needs of each individual customer down to the last detail using the Zuora platform, we want to further strengthen our already strong integrated device business at a global level.”

The traditional product economy has a standard set of linear processes that often break in the Subscription Economy. With Ricoh’s new subscription offering, their order-to-revenue process becomes much more complex, with customer renewals; suspensions; mid-cycle upgrades or add-ons; and cancellations. Typically managed by the ERP systems of product-first companies like Ricoh, pricing and packaging changes like freemiums, upgrades, downgrades or add-ons are impossible to test and launch.

Ricoh plans to use the Zuora platform to help the company achieve the following business goals:

Minimize a reliance on legacy ERP systems – Ricoh will use Zuora to manage the financial processes required to digitize difficult business processes. The Zuora platform will enable Ricoh to parse transactions into billable options – by user, type of workflow – the capabilities Ricoh’s ERP system was difficult to support.

A single global infrastructure for the subscription business – The Zuora platform will manage service menus, service packaging, and other processes for the services/ workflow provided by Ricoh Smart Integration. It will work as the global infrastructure ensuring scalability and the ability to handle different currencies, commercial practices, and payment methods around the world. While providing new value to corporate customers in Japan, North America, South America, Europe, and Asia through Ricoh’s IM Series, it enables powerful subscription business management at a global level.

Faster go-to-market with new digital services – With one global infrastructure to support the Ricoh Smart Integration platform, Ricoh will be able to add new services or applications more quickly than ever before as it builds its digital business. The Zuora Billing platform allows easy handling of future function expansions and cross-selling, up-selling, and delivers the speed and agility demanded of a subscription–based business.