Published on the 08/03/2023 | Written by Heather Wright

Assisted by ERP services acquisition… 

A ‘recalibration’ of FujiFilm Business Innovation’s New Zealand business has seen the solutions and services side of the company grow to be nearly 50 percent – and it’s showing no signs of slowing. 

David Jupe, FujiFilm Business Innovation’s New Zealand managing director, says solutions, software and services will be even more of a focus in the coming year, with the shift ‘going a bit deeper’ than simply focusing more on those areas. 

“It is a shift in our business to thinking more about our customers and how we help them work smarter,” says Jupe, who took over the top role September 2021, moving into the position from his previous role as the company’s general manager for managed services.

“New Zealand is at the forefront in many ways of change in Fujifilm Business Innovation.”

“We’re wanting to engage more in listening and matching products and solutions to their needs. That’s a really big focus for us this year.” 

He admits it is a bit of a cliché to say that by listening to customers the business will gain a clear understanding of where it needs to go to be successful, but nonetheless, he’s standing by it. 

“In our business it is very real. And most of our growth in the last two years has been organic, not the result of acquisition.” 

One recent acquisition was just last week, when parent company FujiFilm Business Innovation Corp announced its acquisition of A/NZ ERP and IT services company MicroChannel Services, which also has an Auckland office (previously the SAP Business One division of SAP specialist RealTech).

It’s indicative of the company’s growing focus on providing a wider services and solutions offering, where New Zealand has led the way. 

Naoki Hama, Fujifilm Business Innovation Corp president and CEO, says the deal is ‘an exciting step’ on the company’s path to growing its ERP systems and services as one of the core business offerings.

“This is just another example of Fujifilm committing to a direction that is more about solutions,” Jupe says.

“Oceania is the area experiencing the most dramatic change and the most interest in IT services and solutions, so it’s a fairly logical progression for us to invest in this area and encourage growth in this area.”

The services push isn’t, of course, a foreign concept for the company. It’s print business has long offered services as a key part of its business proposition.  

“When we sell a print device into a customer, we provide services to them for the next five to seven years regularly in support of that capability. So, it’s just a natural progression to expand more into that area, as opposed to being a product vendor,” Jupe says.

Prior to lockdown, services and solutions were only around 10 percent of the business. Today almost half is solutions and service based, driven in part by Covid, but also helped by the 2020 AU$140 million acquisition of CSG, including IT services company CodeBlue.

“We don’t get to choose the environment we are in, and in lockdown people were working from home, people were printing less, offices were closed, schools were closed. At the same time CodeBlue and our process automation team were in high demand as people were grappling with how to work in a remote environment, and streamline workflows.

“It sort of happened by default. We’ve just seen it as an opportunity and chosen to accelerate it.” 

Accounts payable and billing automation have become key growth areas for the business, which is now one of the largest install providers for document automation and order management solutions provider Esker.  

“Businesses are really looking to address back-office processes, and as they are working more remotely and needing to interact with customers in a digital manner, it’s become a big part of our business,” Jupe says.  

The company counts names including Xero and SealesWinslow among its customer base. Xero using Esker Purchasing and AP automation, and agri-nutrient company SealesWinslow using Esker Sales Order Management to free up its customer service team from order entry tasks and improve service levels.  

Jupe says the company is also involved ‘quite heavily’ with most of the banks in automating back-office processes.   

The ongoing shortage of skilled resources are also driving process automation, as customers look to streamline back-office processes as a way to counteract shortages. Process automation is the fastest growing part of Fujifilm Business Innovation’s operations, with around 30 percent compound growth in the past three years. 

It’s been working with Wellington City Council on a multimillion project to digitise the city’s archives going back to 1840. Currently one-third of the way through the project, with more than 10 million scans completed, Wellington City Council has estimated that the collection of papers, if stacked on top of each other, would stretch for 12km and would have taken them more than 20 years to digitise on their own. With a large Fujifilm team working onsite, the project is expected to take three years.

Jupe says the business is also seeing ‘dramatic’ growth in its security services business via CodeBlue.

“Those two areas have been very significant for us.”

Jupe says it is projects with customers that form the basis for new services and solutions offerings for the company.

“There’s a shift in culture from a telling to listening culture to enable us to hear what customer’s challenges are [and build solutions around that],” he says. 

“We are developing new things all the time with customers.

“We’ve moved into the Microsoft space and are progressing that very quickly.

“We expect the growth in new capabilities and opportunities to come from local operating companies like ours with people dealing with customers, as opposed to historically how our business would design a product, build it, launch it and market it from Japan.” 

He’s promising there will be more new offerings this year, but he’s coy on what form they might take, saying all the information hasn’t been communicated to internal teams yet. 

“But the key message is you will see more and more form us. We will never stop finding ways to help Kiwis work smarter. 

“New Zealand is at the forefront in many ways of change in Fujifilm Business Innovation with almost half of our business is solutions and service based,” Jupe says. “That’s quite different to other regions and there’s a lot of interest as to how we have developed that, what the future looks like and how we can grow it more quickly.”