‘Innovation powers our business’

Dr Sophie Vandebroek is Xerox's chief technology officer and the president of the Xerox Innovation Group since 2006. She is responsible for overseeing Xerox's research centers in Europe, Asia, Canada and US. Previously, Dr Vandebroek was chief engineer of Xerox Corporation and vice president of the Xerox Engineering Center, technical advisor to Xerox's COO and director of the Xerox Research Centre of Canada.

Dr Vandebroek is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, a Fulbright Fellow and a Fellow of the Belgian-American Educational Foundation. She has received awards from Xerox, IBM, HP, Monsanto, the Belgium National Science Foundation, Semiconductor Research Corporation, IEEE, and Cornell University. In 2011 Dr Vandebroek was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame and elected into the Royal Flemish Academy for Arts & Sciences. In an interview with Dataquest some time back, she talked about the key trends in document management outsourcing, the print business, Xerox's emphasis on research/innovation and the market shifting to digital and how Xerox is empowering its clients in many different ways. Excerpts

On the digital shift

The industry is definitely going through a major transition, and certainly the shift is towards more and more digital and I definitely see a scenario in 10 years down the line, enterprises will not be using paper at all. But that does not mean, printing will die, but it will complement the digital infrastructure. In line with the market shift our revenue traction demonstrates a significant tilt towards business process outsourcing services, and this slice is growing for us significantly. If we look at 2012 Xerox's revenues, the bulk of it has come from outsourcing, which includes business process services, IT outsourcing services and the technology business, which extends to services like managed print services.

Yes, we will do printers but here again, managed print services is ushering in significant value for the customers. To give an example, one of our clients-P&G-which used to have 60,000 print devices globally and in a span of 5 years we have consolidated that to 6,000 devices globally and in the process shifted bulk of their document processing needs to managed print services. So the point I am making is that its digitalization of infrastructure, and towards that end we have a combination of products, services, IT solutions and we top it with state of the art document management and imaging processing expertise acquired through cutting edge research.

On Innovation

Innovation is the crux of what we do and the heart of what we do relates to what we call the agile business processes. We enable enterprises to be flexible and nimble. We devise ways and means that cuts manual processes and interventions. This clearly brings down the amount of administrative time. Take the case of the healthcare business, we are looking at completely weeding out of manual processes so that all patient records are digitized. We are also creating innovative solutions. For instance we realized that in a typical hospital, a significant amount of nurses' time goes in individually managing the case sheets of so many patients and they spend a huge amount of time on connecting various different patient specific parameters like drugs, treatment protocol et al.

In this backdrop what we did was that by creating a smart software we connected all the layers and enabled it on an iPad and now nurses can have a single window view of the patients and at all times have the insight and discovery to manage the particular patient. But still, it's an ongoing process, there will always be some amount of manual interventions and we are constantly trying to improve efficiencies. The same applies to our insurance claims processing as well, just to give a sense, in a year we process millions of claims but we do have some manual processes that need to be eliminated and we are always working on innovative solutions for these challenging scenarios.

 

Whether it be products or new services, we spend a lot of time on research. We do about 10 patents a week and have invested around $1.8 bn in R&D and we have in total filed around 55,000 patents over the years. Our research cuts across a spectrum, from transportation infrastructure to toll gate to parking lot management. We use innovative image processing that automates the whole lot of processes and brings in high degree of efficiency and management.

The Xerox Research Centre India is one of 5 global centers we have. Researchers from our center collaborate closely with their peers in the US and Europe, who in turn actively participate in Open Innovation partnerships in India. These research partnerships cover a broad range of topics including cloud computing, services marketplace design, multilingual technology development, personalized information delivery, video based patient monitoring and rural technology initiatives.

India as a market

We are seeing spectacular growth across our technology business and we are indeed an early mover in the managed print services. Our revenues here in India is definitely growing faster as compared to globally. On the research side, India is emerging as a key hub with some key innovation happening. The Xerox Research Centre India (XRCI) was inaugurated in March 2010 and the center's mission is to capture innovation opportunities for Xerox in the emerging markets and to advance our position as the leading global provider of document and business process services.