Imagine a world where the corporate culture allows employees to leave early after finishing what they need to do for the day.

You can go home to your family, relax, hang out with your friends, pursue your other interests, get a good night's rest, and come back for work feeling refreshed and rejuvenated, inspired to take on another productive day at the office.

This is the vision behind The Ambition Gap, which was officially launched yesterday by Canon Singapore in conjunction with AMI Partners.

This is the first Singapore-based survey to qualify and quantify success factors for Singapore companies. It provides a methodology for companies of any size and in any sector to measure how far away they are from achieving their ambitions and what they can do to bridge the gap between expectations and achievements by utilising technology to enhance productivity.

Mr Lim Kok Hin, Senior Director and General Manager, Business Imaging Solutions and Business Solutions Division, Canon Singapore noted: "At Canon, we believe that when companies map their business objectives and goals with individual employee's ambitions, magic occurs. The Ambition Gap showcases the success that can be achieved by aligning corporate ambitions and employee ambitions."

Venu Reddy, Vice President, Asia Pacific, AMI Partners, added: "The Ambition Gap is the difference between a company's achievements and its objectives or what it needs to do to get to the top. Successful companies are the ones who close the gap - with technology-enabled business processes as their levers."

To illustrate this, Mr Lim used Canon's new imageRUNNER ADVANCE printer to show how technology can simplify business processes. With this, a company can have individual user profiles for each employee. This will allow them to program common, repetitive tasks, so a ten-minute process can be performed in a few seconds at the simple touch of a button.

Technology like this would allow employees to perform their tasks more quickly, allowing them to be more productive at work.

Mr Lim says this is all about the most efficient way to get the job done, and quoted Minister of Finance Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who earlier said: "Higher productivity does not mean that Singaporeans have to work longer on the job. It will mean working smarter. They must make greater use of technology to reorganise work."

He concluded, "Canon technology will enable you to bridge the Ambition Gap, empower you to live more enriching lives, and achieve your ambitions."