How Ricoh united a globally dispersed workforce and disparate enterprise systems in one Jive-n social intranet that’s accessible anywhere and anytime.

Transcript

We are a global technology company based in 120 countries with over 109,000 employees. Several years ago, Ikon was purchased by Ricoh, and we had a challenge of really uniting two very large organizations and bringing together not only employee bases, but also the platforms that we had, into a streamlined technology that allowed us to consolidate information, but also to connect our employees across the organization. We looked at large companies, CRM solutions, we looked at some other technology, leading providers and really utilizing industry research, the Gartner Magic Quadrant and our own research of all of the different use cases that we had. Jive was clearly the best of breed solution for every use case that we had. Both today, and then also in the future. It had everything we were looking for to connect employees from a collaboration standpoint, which was important. But it also had the ability for us to use the solutions out of the box, to change business process and to make our employees work more efficiently, which ultimately is the goal of the platform.

We use Jive today for not only communication and executive messages, but it’s also become a place where employees can post information and discussions, share ideas with each other and best practices in a way that we never had with the brick and mortar office, or the stagnant use of e-mail. We’ve connected Jive to many of the systems that all employees are using today. Not only our time management system, but also our training system, our CRM solution. So it really acts as the main portal which links you out seamlessly to the other areas of the organization that our employees are going to. And it’s available from anywhere. The access mobility, the access from, you know, a device anywhere in the world at any time, makes it a very easy solution for our employees to now have access in real time, to all of the information and communication that they need. Some of the features that we’re using include the profile information. It’s a great way for our employees to connect with each other.

With the org chart functionality, we can in real time see who works in an organization and how their profile can be connected to another employee in a different part of the organization.

Expertise location, that’s been a huge win for us. We also use the Microsoft Office connector, and in all different aspects of the organization we’re finding that all employees are using this as a way to work in Microsoft Office, but be connected to Jive without ever actually having to go into the platform. So it makes their work processes better and more efficient, but they are doing things in a way in which they would have in the past. So it makes it very seamless to them.

Just six months after we’ve launched our Jive community, we’ve had significant results. 81% of our employees feel more connected at work. 72% feel more effective in their jobs on a daily basis. We’ve reduced reliance on e-mail. In addition, we’ve also been able to connect our remote employees, several thousand of them, into the intranet, which we weren’t able to do in the past. Jive is helping Ricoh to get work done. It has changed the way our organization fundamentally operates. Our employees are connected. They’re getting work done more efficiently and effectively, and it’s making our organization more competitive in the marketplace.