Xerox is the world's leading enterprise for business process and document management solutions and that’s no longer limited to the office. Xerox is working behind the scenes in areas like customer care and transportation. The company is going deep in several industries, like healthcare and financial services, and broad in important business functions like finance and human resources. Since its founding in 1903, the company’s basic principles have remained the same ….to invent ways that make work, and life, a little simpler and sustainable. Figure 1 illustrates the span of Xerox business today.
Continuing to Enable the Sustainable Enterprise
Since its earliest days, corporate citizenship has been part of the company’s core values. Xerox has been placing sustainable products on the market for decades. Xerox researchers develop technologies that minimize the environmental impact of document systems and business processes, while at the same time improve productivity and reduce costs. The decades of sustainable products and services from Xerox are shown in Figure 2.
Xerox was a recipient of Supply & Demand Chain Executive magazine’s 2014 Green Award because of the breadth and depth of sustainability in its operations, products and services. At Xerox, sustainability is integrated into key business processes including purchasing, customer service, product design, manufacturing, logistics and transportation. Xerox was an early adopter of Greenhouse Gas reduction targets. In the early 2000s, the company committed to reduce GHGs across its worldwide operations by 25 percent by 2012. By the end of that year, Xerox exceeded a 30 percent reduction.
Xerox believes that the global demand for energy, and the environmental consequences of products used by enterprises and consumers, has elevated market interest in sustainable solutions. Xerox has a tag line, “Xerox helps you focus on what matters most—your real business.” Diane O’Connor, Vice President Xerox Environment, Health, Safety & Sustainability, builds on this tag line by stating, “Many customers are equally delighted when they understand how our products and services help them reach their respective sustainability goals. Innovation is key to delivering on that promise.” Take for example, Xerox® Digital Alternatives offering announced in November 2014 that enables customers to eliminate paper and significantly reduce their carbon footprint.
But did you know a reduced carbon footprint is also made possible with other Xerox Services like those in transportation? Innovation continues to be a core strength of the company, as well as a competitive differentiator. The aim is to create value for customers, for shareholders, and for employees by driving innovation and enabling sustainability in key areas. Below are some game-changing solutions from Xerox to overcome the challenges of our everyday life that increase costs, stress levels and result in increasing levels of GHG emissions.
Innovation and Research
Transforming Data into Actionable Decisions: Competitive advantage can be achieved by better utilizing available information and real-time data. Today, information resides in an ever increasing universe of servers, repositories and formats. The vast majority of information is unstructured, including text, images, voice and videos. One key research area for Xerox is making sense of unstructured information using natural language processing and semantic analysis.
Xerox developed an analytics-based engine that dynamically adjusts parking rates based on driver demand for spaces and availability. It models how people choose parking spaces and the flexibility available to drivers about where, when and for how long they stay. The parking engine is integrated as a module into our new Merge® parking management system, which is a single portal for managing a Los Angeles’ meters, pay-by-mobile phone, sensors, enforcement and collections. Figure 3 provides a screenshot of the information that is displayed with Merge®.
Studies from UCLA indicate that the time averages for a motorist in Los Angeles searching for a parking space ranges from 3.5 to 14 minutes, depending on time of day. This consumes 47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of carbon dioxide in Los Angeles on an annual basis. With a solution such as Merge® fuel consumption and emissions of GHG are greatly reduced.
Creating Agile Business Processes: Businesses require agility to quickly respond to market changes and new business requirements. To enable greater business process agility, Xerox research strives to simplify, automate and enable business processes on the cloud via flexible platforms that run on robust and scalable infrastructures.
Xerox is adapting its expertise in imaging to the area of Computer Vision. The ability to extract and analyze vast amounts of information from videos and images touches areas as diverse as surveillance, healthcare, education, transportation, environmental sciences and reading written records. In transportation, researchers have developed a high-speed, video-based license plate recognition technology that is 99 percent accurate. It automates highway toll collection and reduces wasteful fuel consumption because the vehicle is no longer idling when paying the toll.
Building on 75 years of innovation
The core of the Xerox story is based on the premise that we live in an age where technology is producing transformative change, enabling businesses big and small to accomplish more than could have been dreamed possible decades ago. Xerox believes it’s in a strong position to capitalize on market opportunities and deliver on our commitment to create value for all our stakeholders. Xerox points to its Services business as a beacon for its path forward; its Document Technology business is the fuel that allows growth; its culture of innovation that permits big thinking; commitment to delivering earnings expansion; and managing cash in a way that’s building value for you for years to come. Chester Carlson was on to something 75 years ago. And, today Xerox employees continue to believe their purpose is to simplify how work gets done. Quoting Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, “When we do just that in smart, innovative ways, we’ll help the world work a little better… for the next 75 years.”
