Asian American Recovery Services Inc. Case Study

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Case Study

San Francisco's Asian American Recovery Services (AARS) is one of the largest community-based organizations in the United States specializing in providing substance abuse prevention and treatment to Asian and Pacific Islander populations. Working for a non-profit social services agency brings a great deal of intrinsic reward. However, this reward typically is confounded by a great deal of intrinsic paperwork. AARS is required to meet the policy and process deadlines of multiple state, county, and institutional reporting requirements, all in order to ensure a steady stream of donations and government-funded social service contracts.

But even with this source of funding, budgets are always tight. As the IT Director for AARS, Jonas Aquino must support internal communication resources and provide the data required to analyze and assess new programs, all while being vigilant about keeping costs to a minimum. Aquino wanted to leverage the advanced capabilities of Ricoh's multi-function printing/copying devices (MFPs) to meet his organization's information sharing needs, but he did not know exactly what these issues were, nor which of them to address first.

Aquino's Ricoh sales representative introduced him to Ricoh Innovation's customer research team and he decided to sign up Asian American Recovery Services (AARS) as a research project candidate to gain insight into his information sharing needs. Ricoh Innovations welcomed the opportunity to team with an IT department to deploy a solution, since it gave Ricoh an opportunity to better understand IT requirements as well as end-user needs. Aquino selected a small number of AARS staff to complement the four-person team from Ricoh. A mutually agreeable project plan quickly was established.

Inquiry

Once all the team members were introduced to the Ricoh research process, AARS selected three of their branches, as well as their San Francisco headquarters for the initial site survey. Using non-intrusive methods, such as observation and office mapping, the team captured workflows and then confirmed them in short lunchtime meetings with both staff and management from AARS. In total, the process of surveying the four sites took about one day per location, with additional time for note summarization and process map creation.