Ricoh identifies nearly two-thirds of UK print businesses are missing out on potential growth opportunities due to failure to invest in the correct technology

Ricoh UK, London, 20 June 2023: A new report, titled The Automation Gap, from Ricoh UK has identified a potential growth opportunity for the print sector with over half of businesses believing they have failed to invest in technology to drive their industry forward.

The report, which examines attitudes and adoption of automation from more than 150 key stakeholders across the sectors of printing, imaging and associated digital services, found that while nearly 80% of the printing industry wants to automate to improve efficacies, over half (52%) of businesses are still running on legacy or manual systems. Further, more than two thirds of the industry (66%) anticipate increased investment in business process automation.

Simon Isaacs, National Sales Director, Ricoh UK added: ''When it comes to print services, document storage, signing and delivery, automation has to be the next ‘business-as-usual’ implementation. Evolution is a central part of business success and the results of our survey demonstrate just how eager the print sector is to drive innovation and utilise automation to improve the quality of service and productivity of their employees.''
This research has far-ranging implications for many industries, but has a particular impact on those reliant on print services, such as public sector agencies.
Ricoh’s long history in supporting public sector businesses has already demonstrated the impact automation can play in reducing costs and increasing efficiencies as was seen in recent work with the DVLA.

The DVLA, which produces over 100 million driving-related documents a year or the equivalent of 500,000 a day, partnered with Ricoh to help improve efficiencies and sustainability efforts in line with an expected 30%, year-on-year, increase in print volumes.

The installation of the Ricoh Pro VC60000 helped to ensure the DVLA was able to exceed their required service-level agreements as set by a range of government departments. The agency was able to beat production timeframe targets by half, whilst reducing paper usage and machine downtime and cutting maintenance costs. 

Jonathan Gordon, OSG IT Development Manager at the DVLA, said: ''Ricoh Process Director is really the brains behind our operation and was ideal for the type and volume of work we do at the DVLA. Its flexibility means we can create different applications, manage the large volume and complexity of data we receive and process transactions quickly. It tracks print jobs through the different print and processing devices, so we know where every mail item is at any point in the system. We can now create our own workflows and job paths depending on type of data and document. That is very helpful because we can make changes ourselves, when file type changes for instance, without having to rely on specialists.''
To learn more about the future impact of automation in print and document management for business, read the report here. To read how the DVLA reduced costs and improved efficiencies through automation, please view here.