For over ten years, Ricoh Industry has been working on a system to promote work efficiency and has built the foundation for company-wide data visualisation and analysis, which it refers to as “one click”. Dr Sum and MotionBoard have been central components of this strategy.

Ricoh has faced a number of challenges over this ten year period, which included the merger and integration of several companies into the group and a consequent five-fold increase in employee numbers, with business sites now dispersed across several geographic regions throughout Japan as well as a global production base across Asia.

With this expanding business, it has become more important than ever to provide everyone with access to the same data, from senior management to workers on the factory floor. This means decisions can be made based on the global, organisation wide data, rather than just the local picture.

The key concept of Ricoh’s “one click” approach has therefore been to build the capability for anyone to access, aggregate and analyse the necessary information with a simple “one click” operation. As a result, it has become possible to share and visualise information such as product quality, production progress, as well as details of personnel assigned to the production line and the monthly forecast results. When data is input into the system, such as a daily line work report, details such as the production forecast, efficiency differences by line, and shifts in attendance rates by line are immediately reflected in the visualisations on the dashboards. By clicking on the graph, users can drill down to more detailed information, which contributes to faster problem solving.

With this system in place, Ricoh has been able to address 3 main challenges: