Driving Change with Intelligent Automation at FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific

About FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific 

FUJIFILM Business Innovation is the world’s leading provider of document services and printing technologies, using smart, pioneering devices and transformational solutions that drive business innovation to advance organisations for the digital future. In 1991, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific Pte Ltd was established as a subsidiary and gateway to FUJIFILM Business Innovation products, services and solutions in the Asia Pacific region. Over the past two decades, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific has equipped businesses with innovative, intuitive technology to streamline work processes and enhance employee experience and productivity. With a strong network of customers and partners, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific continues to deliver value for customers through its suite of digital and cloud solutions, and industry-leading technology. Effective April 1, 2021, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. will be renamed FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd.

Coping with Time-Intensive Tasks

As a customer-centric organisation, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific prepared sales and customers reports for more than 4,500 customer accounts on a daily basis. This was a time-intensive process as salespersons were required to manually download and consolidate data from various systems, and format and reconcile figures before preparing an analysis for management review. With 120 salespersons at FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific, this meant that each salesperson produced an average of four summary reports each day on top of their core work and sales-driven activities. 

Using these sales and customers reports, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific’s finance team would proceed to perform their credit evaluations. In order to decide on a credit score for each customer, the finance team had to manually review the reports and data, which took up half a day. Without the use of automation, a significant volume of hours was spent on these repetitive, administrative tasks.

In its efforts to remain relevant in today’s digital economy, it became crucial for FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific to undertake a review of these procedures, and adopt digital tools to simplify these backend processes to enable faster decision-making. By automating these processes, the business could eliminate the risk of human error.

- Henrietta Yaw, General Manager (Information Management), FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific

Reaping the Value of RPA

The Japanese concept of ‘Genko Itchi’ or ‘walking the talk’ is central to FUJIFILM Business Innovation and its subsidiaries. In line with this corporate philosophy and with digital transformation being a necessity now more than ever, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific took the lead in working with FUJIFILM Business Innovation Singapore to relook at its internal processes for greater efficiency, as well as harness their expertise in reforming workflows.

UiPath’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform was one digital solution identified by the FUJIFILM Business Innovation team for enhanced work productivity. As a fully integrated, end-to-end automation RPA solution, UiPath’s RPA platform is flexible enough to automate various tasks across a wide range of departments. UiPath’s RPA robots automate processes from the bottom up, streamlining workflows and bringing efficiency and productivity benefits. By applying RPA, businesses can achieve both scale and speed, reduce costs and improve output quality. UiPath is a premium RPA solution, well established and trusted in the market, making it the team’s preferred choice.

Recognising the potential of UiPath in transforming FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific’s backend processes, the team identified work functions that would be more effective with RPA. In particular, RPA automated and simplified the numerous variations of the sales summary reports by extracting various data from pre-determined sources.

Besides standardising the format of sales summary reports, RPA could also generate reports at a moment’s notice, streamlining the reporting process and facilitating quicker management reviews.

The second process that the FUJIFILM Business Innovation team jointly reviewed was customers’ credit evaluation and reporting by the finance team. Instead of manually studying customer data and reports, credit personnel benefitted by automating the credit scoring process through UiPath. This sped up the credit scoring and decision-making process for credit personnel.

By streamlining processes with RPA, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific was able to free employees from manual repetitive tasks, enabling them instead to focus on higher value-added work such as financial planning and customer service.

Unlocking Performance and Scalability

Since automating these two key backend processes with UiPath, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific has achieved a reduction in processing time. With RPA, the business has successfully eliminated repetitive tasks and secured the skills needed to effortlessly design and build enterprise-wide processes. This has enabled the business to enhance organisational priorities, empowering its workforce with greater flexibility.

The sales and finance teams have also been able to dedicate more time on engaging in their field of work and spend less time on routine administrative work. This has greatly improved employee morale. Since offloading routine tasks to RPA, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific has also achieved lower error rates. This has been possible as data are accurately extracted and reports automatically generated, thereby improving workflow accuracy.

FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific has also ‘walked the talk’ as an innovative technology leader by implementing its own digital solutions across its operations. To date, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific has created a smarter workplace by rolling out a similar intelligent automation strategy at other Opcos, such as FUJIFILM Business Innovation Thailand and FUJIFILM Business Innovation Hong Kong. By actively identifying future automation opportunities, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific has continued its advance in a digital era and honed its competitive edge on a regional level.

FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific can also further leverage the more efficient, more scalable capabilities of a robot workforce by harnessing AI, and create greater organisational returns.

- Henrietta Yaw, General Manager (Information Management), FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific