Lisa Oakleaf · Director, Global Software Product Management · RICOH

At PRINTING United 2026 in Las Vegas, Pat McGrew meets Lisa Oakleaf from Ricoh to talk about what may still be one of the company’s best-kept secrets: workflow.

Ricoh is obviously known for its production printing equipment, but the conversation around software has changed significantly. Instead of presenting individual workflow products and asking customers where they might fit, Ricoh is increasingly starting with the customer’s actual production environment.

How does the job arrive? How is it onboarded? What happens in the MIS? How does it move through prepress and preparation? Where are the bottlenecks? How much capacity is available? And how can production data be used to continuously improve the business?

For Lisa, that’s an important change.

The solution to a production problem isn’t necessarily another Ricoh product. It may be professional services, integration between existing systems, a partner technology or a combination of several technologies working together.

The focus is increasingly on the outcome rather than the product.

And customers are changing as well.

For years, workflow was sometimes something discussed after the printing equipment had been selected. Today, Lisa sees printers increasingly starting the conversation with software, automation and integration because the hardware itself has become so capable.

Skilled employees are also becoming harder to find, and much of the knowledge that traditionally resided in the heads of experienced operators needs to be captured in workflows, automation, and data.

That leads naturally to AI.

But Lisa makes an important distinction: before printers can extract meaningful value from AI, they need to understand and organize their data. Production information sitting in isolated systems won’t suddenly become useful simply because an AI layer is added on top.

The first step is therefore understanding the workflow, connecting the systems, and building a meaningful data strategy.

Then AI can become genuinely useful rather than simply another industry buzzword.

At PRINTING United, Ricoh has deliberately placed workflow much closer to the center of its story, showing how hardware, software, services and partner technologies can work together across an entire production environment.

Because increasingly, buying a faster press isn’t enough.

The real question is how efficiently you can get work through the entire factory.

Watch Pat McGrew’s conversation with Lisa Oakleaf from Ricoh at PRINTING United 2026 in Las Vegas.