Company Announcement - Ricoh SA will sponsor and participate in the Gartner Symposium /ITxpo Africa 2015 taking place in Cape Town from September 28 to September 30 this year. Gartner says of the symposium: “This is a decisive moment. A digital wave is sweeping through every industry and there is no safe haven to ride out the disruption. Which makes this a defining challenge for every CIO and senior IT executive: a chance to rise up, align your mission critical priorities, both personal and enterprise, and drive business outcomes.”

“Gartner, with its strong global reputation as a leading research and analysis firm, assembles companies from all around the country to learn the benefits of digitisation, the impacts it has already had on South African businesses, the lessons they’ve learned from rolling it out, and what the future will hold,” says Jacques van Wyk, COO of Ricoh SA. “It’s a gathering of the most current information and lessons we have in the country and it creates the ideal platform for companies like ours to bring our messages around digitisation to companies trying to get their heads around the practical realities of digitising their organisations.”

“Many people think of Ricoh as a printing company,” says van Wyk, “but the digitisation trend years ago began shaping our future too, which is why we have become a services-led business based on the global lessons we have learned from our own business as well as our customers’ requirements. We currently have our own advanced digital strategy and we continue to work with our customers and top global research firms to lead this trend. One of the key lessons we have learned to date is that this goes beyond technology – it embraces new ways of working as new generations enter the workforce and simultaneously become producers and consumers of business services and products.”

Among the many case studies and thought leadership presentations from South Africa’s top vendors and service providers, Ricoh SA will demonstrate by case study how it helped Total South Africa digitise its business to meet regulatory demands as well as business goals such as cost reductions, flexibility, efficiency, speed and agility by shedding paper in favour of digital records and workflows.

Attendees will learn how Total South Africa reinvented its paper office to become a digital environment. The company faced a number of challenges in completing the project. They centred on its move from old to new premises, which dictated strict as well as tight deadlines that were not allowed to compromise the intended business and environmental benefits of the project. The project scope was also broad as it affected 900 employees and 5 million historical, paper records. Attend the symposium and learn how Total South Africa successfully mitigated the risks, overcame the challenges, and still delivered the benefits.