A new report, titled The Automation Gap, published by 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 examined attitudes and adoption of automation from more than 150 key stakeholders across 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. Also, more than two thirds of the industry (66%) anticipate increased investment in business process automation.
Simon Isaacs, national sales director at 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 is particularly relevant to industries reliant on print services, such as public sector agencies. As an example of this, Ricoh recently worked with the DVLA, installing the a Pro VC60000 inkjet web press and Process Director workflow software.
Jonathan Gordon, Output Services Group IT development manager at the DVLA, remarked, ‘Ricoh ProcessDirector is really the brains behind our operation and was ideal for the type and volume of work we do. Its flexibility means we can create different applications, manage the large volume and complexity of data we receive and process transactions quickly. 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.’
