Tokyo, January 31, 2011
Fujitsu Limited, Asahi Mutual Life Insurance Co., and Ricoh Company, Ltd. today announced the decision by Asahi Life to replace the business PCs employed by its 15,000-member sales force, as well as the color printers in the company's approximately 750 nationwide sales offices throughout Japan. The business PCs are used to make presentations to customers and design insurance plans. This upgrade, scheduled to begin in January 2012, is intended to bring Asahi Life a step closer to its mission of working together with its customers to help their life insurance planning.
Asahi Life is actively working towards implementing its medium-term management plan by increasing its profitability through enhanced sales capabilities and strengthening its financial fundamentals to improve financial stability. As part of these efforts, the company aims to deploy an information system that will contribute to its business strategy and is revamping its ICT infrastructure to provide a high level of flexibility that is responsive to change.
In June 1991, Asahi Life was among the first in its industry to deploy the Handy-Ai sales PC. Since then, Asahi Life has offered mobile communications and e-mail features as a way to meet the increasingly diverse needs of its customers. To safeguard its customers' personal data, the company converted its software to web-based applications, thereby enabling the integrated management of personal data on its centralized servers.
As part of the upgrade, Asahi Life will be deploying the Handy-Ai V, representing the fifth generation of PCs to be used by its sales force. By employing PCs that enhance customer presentations, Asahi Life will be able to further pursue the delivery of fine-tuned services that are tailored to individual customer needs.
Deploying the Next Generation of Sales PCs
The new sales PC is currently in development with customer use in mind, as a convertible tablet PC featuring a large 12.1" touchscreen. Excelling in product design, ease-of-use, and reliability, Fujitsu is designing and developing next generation PCs specifically for the life insurance industry.
To allow the PC to be employed by sales representatives in a variety of situations when in the field, the computer's screen will be rotated and flipped to give the customer a better view, thereby facilitating customer communication.
In upgrading its infrastructure, Asahi Life will become the first company in the life insurance industry to enter into a large-scale ICT outsourcing agreement encompassing 17,500 PCs, in which the computers will not be retained as assets. More specifically, the company will be utilizing Fujitsu's Workplace LCM Service(1) -a monthly fee-based service providing PCs, deployment, operations and maintenance support, and mobile communications—under a usage fee agreement.
This will provide Asahi Life with access to leading-edge computers while lowering its overall costs, including startup costs and other operations expenses, and reducing its administrative workload. As well, employing a cloud environment based on the latest server integration and virtualization technologies will provide the company with a highly-flexible ICT infrastructure that is responsive to change.
Features of LCM Service
1. Lowers overall costs with flat monthly charges
LCM Service provides PCs, deployment, operations and maintenance support, and mobile communications-which have conventionally required separate usage agreements-as a single monthly fee-based service, thereby reducing Asahi Life's overall costs through a flat monthly usage fee.
2. Reduced administrative workload
Fujitsu delivers a wide range of services, including not only repairs and maintenance, but PC asset management and mobile communications operations, over the complete ICT equipment lifecycle. As a result, Asahi Life will enjoy a lighter administrative workload. By streamlining all operational issues, faster and high-quality service is ensured.
Deploying the Next Generation of Color Printers
For its new color printers, Asahi Life wanted a model designed to be easy for anyone to use, while featuring superior durability for handling high-speed, large-scale print runs, and meeting environmental and energy-saving standards. To fulfill these requirements, the company chose Ricoh's IPSiO SP C821 color printer in Japan.
The printer also incorporates Ricoh's "@Remote" management service, which allows for constant monitoring of an output device's status and usage information over the Internet, while automatically ordering printer supplies and notifying the user when mechanical failures occur. This makes all printing-related tasks, including operations management, more efficient. In addition to enabling the company to focus more on its core business, it will also reduce printing-related CO2 emissions by roughly 200,000 kg per year—the equivalent of planting 14,472 trees(2).
To improve the legal compliance of information collected by Asahi Life, the printer is equipped with a finishing option that binds printed forms by stapling them together in the middle before ejecting them. By printing documents with this option, there is no longer any need to worry about mistakenly mixing pages from other documents together or leaving pages behind.
Product Information
Features of the Handy-Ai Sales PC
- Lightweight 1.2 kg convertible tablet computer featuring a large 12.1" touchscreen
- 12.1" touchscreen provides plenty of viewing room while enabling an easy-to-carry form factor
- Wide 180° left/right viewing angle enhances the computer's use as a sales tool in a variety of conditions
- Design provides user-friendly input using a conventional keyboard and can also fold to be used as a slate PC
- Solid-state drive with encryption automatically encrypts data when writing and decrypts it when reading for convenience and security.
- Robust construction meets Fujitsu's rigorous quality standards and ensures the computer can stand up to rough everyday use
With these and other convenient features, the PC will perfectly fit the workstyle of sales representatives in the field. Moreover, it will enable more persuasive presentations and more efficient on-site sales activities.
