‘Future of managed print services is helping people go digital’

The year 2012 has been one of some changes for the company that has become a generic name for photocopying. With printing declining globally, Xerox is in the process of reinventing itself from a product to a services company. At the end of 2012, Xerox has seen revenues from services go up to 52 per cent.

Sophie Vandebroek, CTO of Xerox, spoke to Business Line on the company’s strategy shift, how it is looking for a different kind of Indian talent and the way it is shaping up to drive innovation.

Xerox (along with Fuji) has filed the third largest number of patents last year amongst American companies. But industry watchers think the pace of innovation at Xerox seems to have slowed down…

I don’t think so. Innovation is in our DNA. We have five research centres globally and on a rough estimate file about 35 patents every week. The Xerox centre in India was started 18 months ago. We have realised that we need a thriving research centre in the emerging markets. We need PhDs. Ninety per cent of our researchers have PhDs from IITs or IIITs. We are not a software development company but into research and have 60,000 patents till date. My vision for India is to translate that kind of global growth into the Indian ecosystem and innovate on the local market but which could have a global impact.

Does your hiring reflect the headcount growth in India?

We have doubled the number of researchers in India in 2012 and will do the same this year. But the numbers are small.

In which areas are you hiring these researchers?

We work in four areas. More than 50 per cent of revenues come from BPO and IT outsourcing services. In 2012, we changed strategy. Now, we have moved to technology-based services in areas such as managed printing services, graphics arts and digital production. Both businesses are important.

As people print less, what would be your strategy?

We have four investment domains. Take the case of healthcare which contributes 25 per cent of the services business.

For this sector, we work with insurance companies, hospitals and process 900 million claims every year. We enable hospitals to migrate into electronic medical records. We are doing a lot of this work out of India and now are figuring out ways to crowdsource and do it in an agile manner.

In our public transportation business, we do 37 billion transactions every year. To put it in context, we answer 1.6 million phone calls, have over 30,000 agents and are working on making these services more personalised across all our verticals, healthcare and transportation.

Then the question is how do we create agile business processes, how do we leverage cloud? Then there are ways to make personalisation ubiquitous — personalising packaging, printing labels and those sorts of services. Finally, there is sustainability from a green footprint and society point of view.

We work in consumer products and are mining social media and working on different ways of personalising it for a customer. Our research in India is to work towards making all these processes agile and present the data in a meaningful way to our customers.

Why didn’t you consider India earlier?

If you are looking at doing research for cheaper talent that is not the way we look at it. Some of our researchers in India are people who have a degree in ethnographic expertise. We are on new kinds of banking projects. It takes more than three weeks to open a bank account in India as the documents need to be sent physically.

These things can be scanned and sent across. Further, through mobile phone and smart documentation technologies, these processes can be done quickly. Indian companies are yet to embrace technologies such as managed printing services and big data.

The future of managed print services is helping people go digital. How do we help people not print at all?

The question is how to completely do away with paper, remove all paper activities in an enterprise. My team in India is working on leveraging technologies through which you can extract information specific to a person’s needs aligned to business processes within an organisation. So, if a person in the HR department is printing ‘x’ number of documents every year as compared to an admin department, we can pinpoint and tell them this information that will enable them to make decisions.

The future of managed printing services is eliminating the manual processes. In India we focus more on crowdsourcing. As an example is the rural BPO.

Instead of having captive Xerox BPOs, how can we find people to do high-skilled jobs in areas such as image processing? For this we are looking at crowdsourcing. Privacy is an issue when it comes to crowdsourcing.

How we can assure them that under that crowdsourcing model, our customer’s data is secure? For that we take several steps. At every instance, we see to it that we give out only bits of work and not the whole chunk.

Also, we ensure that these tasks are simple and which in turn increase accuracy. How do we present information to a person who is not aware of this? These are issues we are trying to address from India.

>Venkatesh.ganesh@thehindu.co.in

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