This year, I was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Ricoh UK, transitioning from my role as Director of Sales. In my experience, successful salespeople understand everything about their customer’s needs and challenges and, by doing so, often exceed expectations. For me, this simple process of listening, understanding and delivering is at the heart of every business or people priority.

So, when it comes to inclusion, I adopt a similar mindset; we need to understand the challenge first, to make change. By building a complete picture of our people – diversity data, inclusion sentiment and feedback – we can unlock the insights needed to nurture inclusion in the right areas.

National Inclusion Week: Take Action, Make Impact.

This year’s National Inclusion Week theme is Take Action, Make Impact.

My translation: business leaders must lead on strategic action to foster inclusion. As it stands only 46% of UK businesses actively collect diversity and inclusion data, this must be the starting point.

It is something we’re taking very seriously at Ricoh too, leading with inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do. By creating a diverse workforce, we can grow and better represent our customers. So how can data collection improve inclusion?

Spot the opportunities

By collecting diversity data across your entire workforce, you can start spotting the gaps and opportunities for inclusion. For instance, you might have one division with a majority who all share the same diversity characteristics.

Diversity is the act of exploring alternative talent pools and rethinking recruitment processes to redress the balance. But acting for inclusion is about looking at the team dynamics, leadership and behaviours, which could mean that a specific area of your business finds it more challenging to attract diverse people.

Find out more about Inclusive Recruitment at Ricoh UK

Remove barriers to inclusion

With full sight of diversity data, specifically where diverse people sit across your organisation, you can highlight areas where it’s more challenging for people from different backgrounds with diverse identities to move vertically and horizontally throughout your organisation.

Once you have the insights, you can implement inclusive growth and development plans that champion difference. Building more diverse leadership and helping people of all identities find fulfilment through work by offering tailored opportunities to grow their skills and experience,

Another way to remove barriers is flexible working, which allows people with different needs, responsibilities and family setups to balance work and life and continue to succeed in their careers.

Discover our Growth and Development programmes

Promoting cultural inclusion

By analysing sentiment towards inclusion and whether your people feel belonging within their teams and the wider organisation, you can also understand where affinity and support groups play their part.

At Ricoh, we have Gender, Ethnicity, Disability and Neurodiversity, and LGBTQ+  affinity groups, empowering employees to open up discussion and learning opportunities in a safe space. Everyone is welcome at our affinity groups, members of communities and allies included.

We also have several employee-led groups covering issues like Menopause and Fertility, a more informal way for our people to share a common lived experience.

By all accounts, our affinity groups are making big impacts. Our 2023 inclusion survey shows 82% of our employees feel that they are treated fairly and with respect, regardless of identity. This was a 6% increase on 2022, since several of our groups launched.

Building data maturity

Of course, to support these endeavours, organisations need the infrastructure and processes to capture consistent data collection, analysis and visualisation. And as a digital services organisation, data maturity is an issue very close to home.

Access to your data and the means to make sense of it can touch all areas of an organisation beyond the people element, from operations and finance to facilities. It can give you the insights to revolutionise your employee experience and the service your customers receive. But putting the right systems in place to manage data is your first port of call.

We’ve created our Digital Services Maturity Indicator to help organisations better understand how to progress with data management, exploring everything from data protection and infrastructure.

Businesses have a crucial role to play in societal inclusion

According to Edelmen’s 2022 Trust Barometer, businesses are society’s most highly trusted institutions. Business outscores government by 53 points on competency and 26 points on ethics. However, survey respondents said businesses were not doing enough to address societal problems.

As business leaders, we have an immense opportunity to take the lead on issues like inclusion and climate change, impacting daily lives.

In my new role, I’m dedicated to leading people-first change. I will ensure we take strategic and data-driven actions to grow a diverse business, while using occasions like National Inclusion Week to encourage our people to take individual action to drive inclusion.

Click to read ESG Ricoh UK

The post Using data to improve organisational and cultural inclusion appeared first on Insights - Empowering Digital Workplaces.

Finding the most efficient way to run your print business isn’t easy. It’s a complex business made up of many variable parts and processes. Orders can come in all shapes and sizes, varying greatly in terms of size and intricacy. Making it difficult to charge jobs accurately and manages their estimating and scheduling into an effective print production process and deliver on time.

To transform estimating and scheduling into something beneficial. Therefore, you need an information-based digital software process. Once established, this digital information enables a more streamlined intake and management process for estimating and scheduling.

Ultimately, the end goal is automation software. A solution that optimises capacity, prioritises urgent tasks and maximises the jobs you get out on time. Subsequently giving you a clear view of what’s happening in your business at any time or stage in the production process.

The value of digital data

Data is a useful resource when evaluating any aspect of your commercial print business. But it’s especially critical in terms of productivity on your print line.

The challenge for many organisations is that their view is restricted to individual components of a disconnected, manual workflow that provides limited useful data. What you need is a clear end-to-end digital process. Providing a clear and deep data overview. One that helps you enhance your estimating and scheduling, but also visualises your entire business activity. Seeing every stage and process, enabling you to identify problems and implement quick solutions quickly.

The value of accurate data for estimating and scheduling

Once your commercial print organisation has obtained this information, you can easily see how long jobs are taking, where bottlenecks are occurring – perhaps urgent small jobs stuck behind a less-urgent large job. In turn, you can use this knowledge to improve production and gauge more accurately what you need to allow for estimating and scheduling.

This increased accuracy in estimating and scheduling is crucial to business success. Not only will you avoid underbidding and directly losing money, but you’ll also avoid overbidding and losing potential work to competitors.

It also means you can optimise your scheduling, getting the full value out of your capacity.

The value of automation

Following data, automation software is the next critical ambition for any successful commercial print business today. It takes time-intensive manual tasks, such as estimating and scheduling, out of your hands. Turning them into efficient processes that improve your business’ workflow. Therefore allowing your people to focus on more important and profitable jobs such as customer relations.

After all, you don’t want to spend longer manually estimating and scheduling smaller orders than it actually takes to run them. Or, worse still, longer than you can realistically charge for them.

The best solutions allow you to automate the workflow where possible. You can’t really automate everything Enabling a smarter business operation and the opportunity to continually hone and finesse your schedule to meet shifting deadlines and resources.

The value of Ricoh Print MIS

One of the best management information and automation solutions available today is Ricoh Print MIS. Our cloud-based solution boasts rich capabilities and has a strong reputation as a collaborative and personalised partner that works with you to meet your exact needs.

With a Ricoh MIS module, you can quickly create consistent quotes from established templates. The Estimating module includes:

• Prepress and finishing estimation capabilities
• Quotes for all types of printing including small format (offset, digital), direct mail, grand/large format, and fulfilment
• Support for customer-specific pricing
• Contract and price list pricing
• Fast access to standard products and product kits

If manual estimating and scheduling is a concern – we can help you.

Take the first step towards transforming your commercial print business into a streamlined, automated operation today. If you would like to speak with a specialist, please feel free to get in touch.

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It’s no secret that data and analytics play an important role in any modern business. It is vital to collect objective information on the people and processes within your organisation. This provides a solid platform from which you can improve efficiency and cut costs.

But today, using data and analytics is much more important than just promoting commercial success. It’s about determining the right steps to improve both business-critical processes and the working environments of your people. Something needed now more than ever.

So, the decision for business leaders isn’t if they should be using data, but how?

How data can increase savings and reduce waste

Imagine a production line where supply exactly matches demand. Where everything happens as efficiently as possible. So material and labour usage is perfectly optimised and nothing is left to waste.

This is the ultimate goal of data and analytics when it comes to productivity. By compiling metrics on all of your factory’s key variables, business leaders can make decisions at an exceptionally detailed level.

Even the smallest of improvements can lead to considerable savings in time and money – such as how Ricoh’s Telford facility saved over £300,000 a year, simply by pinpointing the optimal conditions for toner cartridge filling.

How data can empower your people

It isn’t just your machines and processes that can be greatly improved through data and analytics. They can improve the productivity of your people and create smarter and safer workplaces too.

Through data, you can manage your workforce much more effectively. Predicting what resourcing you will need based on the output required.

You can also accurately designate resources on even an hourly basis – meaning you never have too many people on one job, and no one person ever feels like they don’t have enough support.

How data can help predict costs

Data can create an incredibly clear picture of your entire manufacturing business – especially when it comes to cost.

Accurately cost every item produced in your factory, from material costs and components, right through to energy, labour and storage. Then make precise and confident business decisions when it comes to planning and cost optimisation.

Four things to consider when planning for the future of data

New and improved methods and technologies that use data and analytics to improve the commercial prospects of an organisation are continually being introduced.

If you choose to take greater advantage of data for your business, here are some of the latest features to look out for:

Real-time machine optimisation

An innovation that uses telemetry to collect data from machines in real-time. Those machines can then be adjusted live – as they’re running – to ensure optimum performance and overall product quality.

Automated cost reduction

Using data and machine learning to make accurate predictions that allow for improvements in efficiency – even the most minuscule of which can lead to huge savings.

Predictive maintenance

Data also enables AI solutions to accurately predict when a machine is likely to fail, scheduling repairs automatically to minimise downtime.

Collaborating with a partner to make the most of data.

Working with a partner is a fantastic way to introduce improved ways of using data and enhance your business.

Ricoh is an industry leader in the latest data and analytics solutions.  With its innovative ‘Connected Factory’ system it can tailor a specific solution for your manufacturing business.

Ricoh’s Connected Factory 

Ricoh has a great deal of experience in using data and analytics as a driving force for their business. And it’s through data that they’ve designed and implemented their Connected Factory system in their UK facilities.

This system doesn’t simply look at how to improve individual areas of a business, but analyses all aspects of the manufacturing process. Bringing together large amounts of data to create a complete picture of your organisation.

Connected Factory also incorporates innovations like Microsoft Azure and BI Analytics to support machine learning and automation and gain even richer insights. Leading to new opportunities that can heighten your organisations commercial position.

To learn more about the connected factory concept, reach out to Richard Aston, Digital Operations Engineering Manager on LinkedIn.

You can also hear our experts discuss the latest technology, insights, and innovations. Featuring examples from both Ricoh and around the globe via our series of on-demand webinars. Download our informative videos and watch them at a time and place to suit you.

Please visit our Work Together, Anywhere Webinar Series page to find out more

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