The Interview: Aaron Yim, Managing Director, RICOH Hong Kong
Issue 35 - Oct 2007

Moving an office involves more than replacing the existing lease or hiring a so-called ‘space planner’ to do the job. Rita Yu spoke to Aaron Yim, Managing Director, RICOH, Hong Kong to discover his approach.

moving office: a tough call to make
For over two decades, in fact since 1985, RICOH’s offices were located in Wan Chai, Hong Kong. “During those 20 years, there have been a lot of changes and we have faced certain difficulties in long term office planning. For example, there were many ad hoc changes in the organisation, which our space wouldn’t allow us to properly put into practice, so our facilities became old and our office became unstructured,” reveals Yim, explaining how the right time never arrived to enable the crucial decision to be made. “Whenever the lease expired, we wanted to move, but then because of some major objections, we stopped. There were several times that we almost moved. And finally, in early January this year, we made the final call and started searching for available space.”

office locations
“Choosing a location is the most difficult task of the whole decision-making process.” Yim explains how the considerations put onto the list were: the proximity to Central district, distance from transportation such as MTR stations. “We have a very large sales force, so being close to a mass transportation is a prerequisite for an office location.” “Unfortunately there aren’t many choices.” To a certain extent, Yim explains, RICOH needs a grade A office to accommodate the floor space and technical support they wanted. “We do have a very big requirement. We needed to find a space which would accommodate us, and allow us to incorporate new facilities. Normally, Grade B offices cannot accommodate such floor space, so with the difficulty of matching our requirements, the longer we stayed in the decision making process, the more problems arose.”

“In January time we started to look for a new location and found premises that were a perfect fit.” The major problem for choosing a location, he explains, was the timing. “There were a couple of big buildings available but most are due to be completed in 2008. We were approached by certain landlords for locations such as the ICC, but the timing just wasn’t right.” Finally, they found One Kowloon, a building where “the landlord was keen to find an anchor tenant to attract other tenants to come in, a big name to fill up a big space.” That meant “we had an OK offer I must say. We needed a longer lease and we managed to sign a contract for six years.”

new ideas for a new office
Having achieved space to expand certain departments within the new office, there
was yet a lot more to accomplish. “There are a lot of new ideas which we also want to introduce in our new office. Indeed, this was also a trigger for the move; in fact, it’s rather a bigger investment.” The decision to make this investment was twofold, explains Yim, pointing out that moving office can “boost the morale of the people, and show the customers what a real documentation company can do by adopting alive showroom office every day.” This means that the actual RICOH office has a dual functionality, it’s an open showroom, where clients can see the equipment and solutions on offer at work.

selection process
Though time constraints meant that the project schedule was tight, the selection process for the move and fit-out were taken very seriously. “The interior
designer selection process took us about six weeks. We invited six big name design companies to do a presentation on the design concept. A few companies
actually withdrew because they thought the timeline was too tight.”

After several rounds of interviews, we chose RHK because they showed the most commitment to achieving a fresh design concept. Many design companies tends to act like a space planner, just like building up a puzzle to fit everybody in. However, the concept and the materials chosen perfectly fit with our company’s philosophy.”

Environmental friendly materials were used throughout the entire office space. For instance, Yim reveals they used bamboo instead of timber and glass to allow
natural light acquisition.

orientation package for the staff
“We care very much about our staff; that is one of the principal reasons that stopped us moving office in the past. We provided lots of information to our
staff, particularly our managers, once the decision to move had been made. During the design and construction period, 3D models were shown. Our Human Resources department even prepared an orientation pack of where to eat, how to get there, maps of bus routes and MTR locations. It really helped our staff to get used to the environment. We even sourced all the take-away menus from nearby restaurants to help our staff familiarise themselves with the area.”

Showing the flexibility one would expect from winners of the Hewitt Associates ‘Hong Kong Employer of the Year Award’ in 2005, Yim even extended the lunch hour by 15 minutes so staff could find the most comfortable place to eat lunch and have the time to do so without worrying about rushing back to the office.

new Facility Management Centre
One of the specialties of the showroom office is the newly installed central printing
management centre, built to handle bulk printing and correspondence distribution. “We are in this business; we know this is the trend, we want to tell our people this is the way we need to do business, we want to tell our customers, this is the future.” This involved consolidating all the bulk printing machines into one place.

“Of course it is said that machines won’t bring direct harm to people, but the decision to separate people from the machines is good. It’s safer, more quiet and efficient. We are an environmental company. By having the machines switched to energy saving mode we have less energy consumption. Good printing also needs to incorporate the concept of being environmental friendly,” Yim concluded.

All in all, the move to RICOH’s new office has been worth the extra work, says
Yim, highlighting that the new space allows “an innovative document workflow,
increased efficiencies and reduces the total printing costs.” Beyond merely reaping the operational benefits of this, he adds, the use of the ‘working office as showroom’ concept helps show clients what RICOH can do, “using ourselves as the proof.” RFP

NOMINATE NOW

Subscribe Now

Sign Up for Ezine

Past Issues