Working Style

In order for people to attain a healthy work-life balance, it is becoming a social aim to realize work style reform that enable flexible ways of working within a company to suit employees' individual situations regarding their private and family life, while fully meeting their job responsibilities. work style reform is an attempt to reduce normalized overtime working and at the same time improve productivity in order to compensate for the reduced working hours.

Fuji Xerox has been conducting research on work style reform since the 1980s and has put many research results into practice. As a company that supports valuable communications that meet the demands of the times, we have been offering new modes of working to other companies based on our own experiences. We have introduced a range of work style reform solutions since 2013, including sales support systems that reduce complex administrative tasks, setting up mobile working environments, and establishing satellite offices. These reforms have produced remarkable results, for example, total working hours in FY2016 were reduced by 13%, and the hours spent on administrative tasks by 55%. Based on our own experience as described above, we are convinced that the key to productivity improvement in business procedures is efficient usage of information through making it available in the format users need, at any time and wherever they are, especially in these days of rapid ICT advancement. However, there is a limit to what we can offer solely relying on our own multifunction devices and services.

In order to offer Smart Work Gateway, our new business service to reform business procedures and working styles, in the way that our customers demand, in addition to utilizing our own multifunction devices and services, we are collaborating with three business cloud service providers: Concur Japan, Ltd., (*1) Sansan, Inc., (*2) and Box, Inc.(*3) We also plan to further increase the number of such partner corporations. Fuji Xerox took the initiative in establishing an ecosystem in which our own multifunction devices and cloud services organically link with our partners' cloud services in order to provide the optimum communication environment for customers seeking to realize work style reforms. Smart Work Gateway will support our customers' work style reform by enhancing business persons’ productivity and work process efficiency.

Fuji Xerox has also developed Cloud Service Hub, a platform that supports the multiple cloud services provided by our business partners. Cloud Service Hub makes major cloud services available through a single interface, including efficient expenditure reimbursement, business card management and information sharing, and file access and printing. The platform offers an easy means of cloud service integration, which can be highly complex, improving business efficiency through making the most effective use of cloud services. Further, by using information collected through its own IoT (Internet of Things) technology and linkage with various cloud services, Fuji Xerox aims to be able to extract customer business issues and provide the optimum resolution by utilizing its longcultivated technologies—language processing, image processing and knowledge processing—as well as big data analysis using artificial intelligence.

Through promotion of Smart Work Gateway, Fuji Xerox continues to support the work style reform by leading to a higher level through realization of diverse working styles in which individual employees can exert their abilities at a high level of performance.

*1 Concur Japan, Ltd. is the Japanese subsidiary of US company, Concur Technologies, Inc., the world's second largest business SaaS vendor for corporate clients. Concur Japan provides back-office support services for employees in travel and expense management and other business areas.

*2 Sansan, Inc. offers a cloud business card management service for corporate clients to integrate business card data into a database and share the data across the company.

*3 Box, Inc. (NYSE: BOX) is one of the world's leading providers of contents management platforms, on which corporate clients can safely manage and access their important information. Box Japan is the Japanese branch of US company, Box, Inc.