Ricoh takes financial planning company wide

Headcount, time and admin savings, as well as accurate forecasting, departmental buy-in and far better responsiveness are chief among the achievements at photocopier manufacturer Ricoh UK Products’ since installing Adaytum financial planning software. The system, says finance director John Gittins, will have paid for itself easily within three years, and at a cost of around £50,000—100,000, he recommends other manufacturers consider the approach seriously. Savings and benefits are felt across the manufacturing and business functions, not just finance, he says. Ricoh gets an automatically generated detailed 12 month collaborative forecast without the time and cost of manual intervention otherwise involved throughout finance, production, sales and the rest. Just as important, that forecast is rolling, rather than fixed and periodically updated, making it much easier to react quickly to change. Gittins says that engineers, supply-chain managers and scheduling managers can now all participate and collaborate around forecasts, and that this has led to increased buy-in to targets. And he adds that Ricoh has achieved ‘linked up’ production and staff forecasts for the first time – as well as saving costs in project management forecasts. Ricoh went live with Phase One in December 2001, and 12 months on says its saving weeks of time and providing data down to the lowest level of detail – line items of machinery, assets, people. “We’re now expanding it to track our Kaizen continuous improvement projects on the factory floor,” he says. And he adds: “it was very quick and straightforward to implement; we used minimal consultancy and I did it myself.”