Ricoh and Web-to-print systems developer Vpress have formed a new partnership to provide PSPs with tools to improve their adaptability and accelerate innovation.
“The genesis for the partnership was the need in our overall business support offering for specific Web-to-print systems that would enable our customers to move from analogue to cloud-based design, specification and order systems for their clients,” said Simon Isaacs, national sales director, Ricoh. “Several of our biggest customers work with Vpress, and so we naturally wanted to investigate their offering. We are very pleased to have built this partnership from this starting point and the future is very bright in terms of its mutual value and the additional business support we can provide to our customers.”
Vpress technology integrates with systems such as Salesforce, SAP/Ariba, Coupa and Oracle.
Vpress sales director Kelvin Bell said: “A pivotal requirement for this partnership was to help Ricoh customers use Vpress technology to provide a service to their own clientele. We will help Ricoh’s customers, the printer, automate and streamline their customer’s experience into their print shop. This ultimately means that, instead of a traditional set-up where Ricoh is a vendor and the printer is their customer, they really do become partners - pursuing a common goal of business growth.
“In addition to assisting these companies with capturing and streamlining more work upstream, we also have done very significant development work with integrating our platforms into Ricoh’s scalable MIS system, Avanti Slingshot.”
Ricoh said Vpress technology, tied into its Avanti Slingshot system, results in optimised workflows, reduced costs and errors and improved turnaround time - and that it provides the opportunity for PSPs to generate new revenue streams through enhanced services that can be processed via the web and tracked and managed throughout the entire workflow.
The other key advantage to the new relationship is that Vpress Coreprint will integrate with Ricoh Production Workflow tools, which automate everything from colour management to imposition.
Isaacs added: “Covid-19 has caused a huge amount of disruption and caused a lot of business damage. Trying to take some positives from this time though, it has given a lot of business owners and managers space to really look at their business in the round, assess how they need to diversify and change to remain relevant and fulfil their full customer requests. Web-to-print software married to state-of-the-art workflows and press technology - be it printing direct to everything from paper to fabric - is fundamental to powering this change. It means that they can focus on the pieces of their business that provide a competitive advantage and add value to their customer’s business, while we take care of these utilities that power that advantage.”