By Mark Davison at Ricoh’s EMEA Strategy Session, London – By “eating its own dog food” when it comes to cloud computing, Ricoh South Africa could nearly double the headcount in its shared services division by this time next year from 160 people to 300.
Jacques van Wyk, executive GM, indirect operations at Ricoh SA, explains that the organisation’s operating companies throughout the world – there are 20 in EMEA – often outsource certain services to each other in order to increase efficiencies and control costs. And they use Ricoh’s own cloud computing to do this.
“For example, if an opco in Europe can provide a service to Ricoh South Africa cheaper than we can do it locally, then we will take advantage of that,” Van Wyk says. “And because these various service are all based around the cloud, users don’t even know that it isn’t being locally provided.”
Van Wyk says that Ricoh SA will be looking to additional employees as it will soon be a Shared Service Centre for the entire Benelux region in Europe.
“We are currently the Shared Service Centre for The Netherlands which has realised that the benefits they are seeing from this can be further extended,” Van Wyk says. “So the addition of Belgium will mean that we are going to need additional staff.
“We are also looking to provide Web services from South Africa to Ricoh UK because of the inherent benefits of this, so there will be additional hiring on this side of the business too,” he concludes.