Our strength is creating scalable journey for our clients: Ritesh Gandotra

We are targeting health care and insurance segment where we are engaged in a few proof of concept activities, says the top Xerox India executive

Xerox competes with the likes of Canon, HP and Ricoh in digital and managed services. What are its focus areas and future bets?

We have been the first to start managed services globally. In addition to that in India we are very clearly engaged with the largest organisations. Our strength is creating scalable, long, transformative journey for our clients. We invest around a billion dollar globally in R&D alone to come up with innovative products. We rolled out 29 different products in one go in the last year in the company’s over 100-year history. As an organisation, we are focused on further innovating with digital solutions. Automation and digitisation would not have traditional machine sellers or device sellers competing with each other. Instead, these segments will see us sharing space with large IT multinationals.

We are targeting health care and insurance where we are engaged in a few proof of concept activities. These initiatives are India-specific but will have global interest for us.

What are the key capabilities and enabling framework that Xerox needs for innovation to transform workplaces?

The foremost thing that we are actively looking into is how we can give (deliver) experiences to our customers rather than just offering them a product or service. So all of it begins with the customer or employee experience which our organisation would want to have. This includes the people who are working for our organisation and how the entire work approach needs to be changed. For example, let’s see how employees look at their print requirements. The philosophy of printing less or printing at low cost by redesigning workflows begins with our employees and we have moved on to offer the same experience to our customers.

Such an approach calls for enabling our devices to have more experience-led user interface by, say, putting up a small tab on our machines. We call it a key technology where we leave a lot of applications for our clients who can run whole automation through those devices by themselves. The devices have to become workplace assistant rather than typical machines. We began by adopting this approach internally before delivering such experiences to customers.

When it comes to workplace transformation what are the key focus areas for Xerox?

We are working with large as well as mid-sized and small enterprises in the private segment and handling very large government sector accounts. In the private sector you have organisations reinventing themselves on the digital side through transformational programmes that they may be pursuing internally. Such organisations want to move ahead from being paper-based to digital. This means there are certain processes that the organisation has been carrying out manually and would like to transform those. In such cases, the focus is on automation through technologies like Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and machine-built learning into devices. We help enterprises of all sizes complete all these processes.

Government projects mostly would be a typical Digital India programme or building smarter city where agencies want utilities to be digital-led. We manage end-to-end activities for such customers.

Could you give an example of Xerox’s latest innovation to transform workplace?

We have been launching smarter devices which help organisations save cost and improve productivity.

One of our devices helps organisations print for less by automating a number of printing processes and at the same time it also automates a lot of routine work and leads organisations to print less. For us both the sides offer cost savings. Then, there are intangible benefits in the form of improved productivity. We, as an organisation, manage the complete life cycle of a document either in paper or digital form. We do not look at paper as a document but holistically. Once you put a document in our device the way it gets picked up and goes into workflow all by itself, it saves cost and productive time for the entire workforce. Our devices and solutions help create rule-based activities for employees. There are savings to the tune of 20 to 30 per cent for customers on case-to-case basis. As clients adopt digital solutions, we ensure the highest class of security is enabled in our devices. Our solutions offer cost reduction, improved productivity and clear engagement on sustainability.