Fuji Xerox Australia’s mission is to provide an environment for the creative and effective utilisation of knowledge, and productive partnerships are key to its success, says Mike Schembri, Head of Information Management at Fuji Xerox Australia.

Like other companies with a background in printers, copiers and multifunction devices, Fuji Xerox Australia wants to deliver solutions rather than simply stand-alone products, and increasingly this means working digitally rather than just with paper.

“We’re in the information industry,” says Schembri, pointing out that while “print is not going to go away,” it is unlikely to grow.

Fortunately, people are generally comfortable with a digital environment in their working lives, so they are open to the possibilities provided by technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

But the switch from selling hardware to selling services did present Fuji Xerox Australia with a challenge that’s not unique to this industry. A change of mindset was required, Schembri says, and that was achieved by taking several measures.

On the ‘people’ side, a combination of staff development and bringing in new talent did the trick. Intellectual property from the parent company also helped take care of ‘process’ and ‘technology’.

Fuji Xerox Australia was able to build from a strong base, says Schembri, because it already had the biggest market share in several categories, as well as trusted relationships with customers. This was key in helping turn their challenge into an opportunity.

As Fuji Xerox Australia had been operating a network of multifunction devices (MFDs) for many years, the company was already engaged with its customers in a connected way, which enabled them to serve as the bridge between the digital and paper worlds. Various technology developments mean the information is able to remain in digital form right up to the point where a paper copy is finally needed.

The way the company has evolved with its customers allows the delivery of better solutions, says Schembri.

But his role as Head of Information Management (equivalent to chief information officer in many other organisations) is mostly internal looking rather than customer facing. “The tech piece is meant to be invisible,” he says, so his team provides internal managed services to the rest of the business, whether that is in a context of traditional IT or digitisation. A significant part of this responsibility involves linking systems so they work seamlessly together.

Since the focus is on services rather than technology, it is important for Schembri’s team to be a good business partner for the rest of the organisation rather than simply being a bunch of ‘nerds’ in the basement.

“IT often has a cultural mindset [separate from the business],” he says, and so may sometimes be considered an outsider in traditional, nontechnology, businesses. Consequently, the challenge is to become business specialists who are also very good at technology rather than being technology specialists first and foremost.

Perhaps uncharacteristically for a CIO, Schembri says, “I find technology boring, [but] people are fascinating.”

Lean and agile

At one stage, he took on the responsibility for running billing and operations in addition to his IT role. By applying ‘lean’ and ‘agile’ approaches he was able to reduce the billing backlog by 93 percent. He discovered that late billing was causing unpleasant surprises for customers, which led to more complaints, which in turn led to more late payments.

There was a feeling that the problem was due to the IT systems, but when he and a couple of his team moved across to this area of the business they determined that the systems were actually robust, and what was needed was a closer relationship between IT and the billing and operations department.

The ‘lean’ philosophy says the person closest to a problem is likely to be in the best place to solve it, so the team implemented 15-minute stand-up meetings of the billing staff, using a whiteboard as its core tool to collect information. While the billing team initially feared that the meetings were just a way of “applying the blowtorch”, they soon realised that it was really about finding solutions together, and even junior staff came up with suggestions that could be usefully implemented.

Apart from improving performance, the changes led to a dramatic reduction in departmental staff turnover.

“We wanted to improve our business credentials… [and this project] gave us a whole new level of credibility,” says Schembri.

Another – and more common – part of his philosophy is that where any particular service cannot be best provided by the IT team, it instead acts as a broker and sources that service from outside providers.

Until three or four years ago, most workloads ran in Fuji Xerox Australia’s in-house data centre. But the company had the realisation that it does not have the scale required to run data centres effectively (partly because of the problems small sites have with staff retention), and so this function was put out to tender, with the eventual winner being AC3.

Best in the world

The general philosophy is “if we can’t be the best in the world at something, let’s hand it to someone that can be,” says Schembri, noting that this approach is very scalable.

Another positive upside of partnering with a cloud provider was that hardly any floor space was needed for IT infrastructure, apart from a small amount of space for the switch cupboards.

The use of certain Fuji Xerox proprietary technology meant some workloads could not be moved to the cloud, but currently almost all of Fuji Xerox Australia’s infrastructure lives in AC3’s data centres. That includes the systems that run a non-virtualised ERP (enterprise resource planning) system.

The company also uses AC3’s Storage as a Service, Compute as a Service and Backup as a Service, and finds them “highly secure and scalable”. In all, Fuji Xerox runs more than 100 applications.

These include software associated with Fuji Xerox Australia’s managed print service (MPS).

The idea behind MPS is that instead of having to select and purchase appropriate printers and MFDs, keep stocks of consumables such as paper and toner, and arrange for servicing when required, an organisation can turnover these responsibilities to an MPS provider and simply pay according to the number of pages actually printed.

The provider is responsible for installing and managing hardware that can cope with the required volumes in an economical way, making sure that consumables are delivered just in time, and for keeping the fleet running.

While “MPS is pretty old” (Schembri notes that he has been deploying it since the early 2000s), many vendors continue to offer it in order to retain their customers’ business in other areas. It’s a service that vendors have to offer in order to be in the running for many organisations’ business in other areas.

To provide this service, Fuji Xerox Australia uses a variety of applications to handle aspects such as metering and fault reporting. Some of them are run globally for the Fuji Xerox operation as a whole (with selected data sent back to Australia; for example, for billing purposes), but the local applications run on AC3’s infrastructure.

“MPS is bread and butter these days… we look to extend beyond that,” says Schembri. To do so requires the customer’s trust, as it means Fuji Xerox Australia becomes increasingly embedded in various processes.

These processes can be key to a customer’s business, he notes. For example, concrete trucks are not allowed onto construction sites without the right documentation, so the management of paperwork (or its digital equivalent) is crucial for a concrete supplier.

By putting in the time and effort necessary to understand customer needs, Fuji Xerox Australia is able to assemble the technology required to deliver these kinds of solutions to customers.

Partnership

When organisations see value, they buy, Schembri explains, and if that value is actually delivered, they stay in long-term partnerships. “That’s where the Fuji Xeroxes of the world have advantages, providing they continue to evolve as their customers’ requirements change.”

It is about understanding what can be done, and then helping to make it reality.

For instance, larger organisations are taking up robotic process automation (RPA) as a way to streamline processes. RPA is becoming a “table stakes capability” for business software, says Schembri, but if implemented internally there is a serious risk of losing expertise if a key person resigns.

Investing in a long-term, trusted partner ecosystem can provide expertise and continuity, as well as a more holistic view. This broader perspective can also help mitigate any governance issues that can occur when non-specialist staff use RPA to combine data from two or more systems.

Returning to in-house technology, the next step for Fuji Xerox Australia is to move from co-location to a full cloud environment, and AC3’s extensive public cloud capabilities means it is in the running for that business.

Fuji Xerox Australia’s relationship with AC3 is similar to what it tries to provide for its own customers, says Schembri: “Find a great partner and work with them.”

Fuji Xerox Australia works with a handful of key partners, he adds. “A brand like ours is courted by everybody,” he says, but the company finds it gets better outcomes when it is not just one of many customers.

“We interview prospective partners as carefully as we interview prospective staff,” Schembri concludes, because a good partner has to understand what the company needs, and relationships like that take time to build.