Ricoh started its U.S. operations in California in 1973 manufacturing desktop calculators and cash registers. Now the California facilities make fax machines, photocopiers, toner, thermal media label stock, and eCabinets, among other high-tech office equipment. The Lawrenceville facility, which presently covers 350,000 square feet, manufactures toner for photocopiers, cartridges, and thermal label stock, shipping approximately $120 million worth annually.

“The company’s strategy in recent decades was to look at the globe and try to localize our manufacturing so we would be closer to our customers. This makes it better in terms of our ability to compete with other manufacturers, and it also gives us a chance to establish a relationship with that community,” explains Pierre. “Although we are a global company, we tend to support American suppliers and sell our products to American markets.”

In Lawrenceville, Ricoh employs about 400 people when operations are at their peak. Pierre sees the company’s relationship with Quick Start as a partnership, which started back in 1989 when Quick Start staff visited the California operations. The present facility celebrated its grand opening in 1990 and has since expanded three times. This represents a $90 million investment. The site contains enough acreage to double its capacity as the company grows.

“Quite frankly, Quick Start has contributed to our bottom line. Human resources are the most important aspect of our business, and Quick Start has been involved here from the very beginning. It has gone above and beyond our expectations in helping us train our workers and set up a model for us to use in our own in-house training. In addition, we are very pleased with Quick Start’s ability and willingness to do follow-up work, an important part of any kind of training plan that often gets overlooked,” explains Pierre.

Ricoh’s U.S. operations philosophy aligns well with the Japanese work culture, and examples of this are numerous throughout the plant. The Japanese word “kaizen,” which essentially means “continuous improvement,” is seen at various workstations along with detailed visual aids on how to perform tasks and follow through on the job at hand.

“We may be happy, but we’re never satisfied,” says Pierre of the company’s performance. They constantly strive for improvement, finding more efficient ways to carry out each task, whether it is cleaning a station or attaching caps to toner bottles. For the visitor, nowhere is this kind of care for systematic detail more obvious than in the company’s team effort to have zero waste disposed into landfills. An intricate, company-wide effort was started a few years ago to make the facility super efficient in terms of finding ways to recycle just about every single element of packaging and refuse.

“Our goal is to make our refuse a resource. We completed our Zero Waste to Landfill Project in one year with everyone’s dedication and creative vision,” says Pierre. Diligence has paid off both in financial ways and in workflow. The five R’s of recycling have profound meaning at Ricoh: Refuse unnecessary waste; Reduce generation of waste; Return unnecessary packaging materials to the supplier; Re-use materials to the maximum possible extent; and Recycle in our manufacturing processes to the maximum possible extent.

The REI Zero Waste to Landfill program has a display room for continuous education of employees and visitors that shows details of the ways individual production and/or work stations of the facility found ways to recycle hundreds of pieces of unusable material, from plastic ties to cardboard packaging. The Lawrenceville plant also is ISO 9001 and ISO 14000 certified.

This kind of team approach to every aspect of Ricoh’s manufacturing process is what makes the facility run at top efficiency 24 hours a day, often seven days a week.

“We believe that if there is a problem, solve it now and permanently,” says Pierre. “We use that solution as a model for other challenges. In this way we have account- ability, we avoid procrastination in finding a solution or a more efficient way to do something, and we have a permanent resolution, not just a ‘fix.’ Quick Start knows the value of this process and appreciates our dedication,” says Pierre. QS