As one of the pachinko machine manufacturing plant, Miyayama Gijyutsu-Kenkyusho Technology Lab has boast a high market share in Japan. The company has introduced LINE WORK and it immediately integrated in to their business. We interviewed Mr. Sato, who was in charge of LINE WORKS integration, Mr. Ebi, one of the integration review members, and Mr. Haneuda, who is currently using LINE WORKS at the manufacturing site.
Tell us about your company and individual roles
Mr. Sato :
Our company mainly designs, manufactures. And sells nail guns and various types of equipment for manufacturing companies. For the nail guns, we are occupying more than 90% of overall domestic demand. With more than 40 years of experience, we have been supplying factory facilities for manufacturing companies.
Mr. Ebi :
I am in charge of planning and supporting sales activities of each department, and making promotion tools. Moreover, I am responsible for managing company infrastructure, website, as well as filming product videos.
Mr. Haneuda :
I am mainly in charge of designing, producing, and installing the factory facilities.
What was the decisive reason that drove you to turn to LINE WORKS?
Mr. Sato :
Even with trivial troubles and issues occurred at the site, it may be regarded as major and important for the company, and eventually become important ‘issue to be solved’. I think that the value of the company is determined by how quickly does the company identify the issue and cope with it accordingly. For this reason, we are countlessly encouraging the site staffs to ‘correct the issues as soon as possible’, and ‘those who are at the site should collect the issue and report to the office’.
In order to do so, we are providing cellphones to every employee. Also, we have been thinking that information sharing and collaboration tool as the most important factor for flawless and fast communication.
Before LINE WORKS integration, we used to have phone call, email, cell phone, and SMS as company communication tools. With the help of cell phones, it was easy and comfortable to report and contact the office. At the same time, however, the problem with the cell phone communication was that we sometimes forget the contents shared (if not written somewhere) or have to contact each individual. To solve this issue, we once established a rule to write email when submitting reports. As a side effect to this, there was ‘an era in which everyone extraordinarily use emails’. By encouraging the entire employees to submit their report by email, and seniors give instructions through emails, I even had an experience of receiving and replying more than 100 emails a day.
There was an incident in which an employee mistakenly sent an email to somebody outside the company. Because the content of the email itself was classified low in confidentiality, it did not lead to a big problem. But, this has become a turning point for us to reconsider about our way of collaboration. While searching on the internet, we accidentally encountered LINE WORKS and find it suitable for our use. We first introduced the tool to the five employees, representative from each department, as a trial.
Mr. Ebi :
I was the member who tried using LINE WORKS during trial period. After figuring out some of the features, we came up with the conclusion that LINE WORKS is the collaboration that we have been looking out for. And, we decided to adopt LINE WORKS to the entire company.
What were the issues before the introduction of LINE WORKS?
Mr. Ebi :
One of the obstacles for collaborative work was that we could not share information fluently under the environment in which computers cannot be used. For example, when employees are out for either long-term business trips or construction sites, we could not find out if the collaborators checked the email or the information in properly shared until receiving the response from them. For this reason, there were delays in response as well as a number of employees were involved to solve the issue. This was so inefficient in every aspect.
Mr. Haneuda :
Before LINE WORKS integration, we used to contact each other through phone calls or emails. Using email as a communication tool was burdening and ineffective since we could use it only after successfully setting the network. I think this was one of the reasons causing delays in the response.
Why did you choose LINE WORKS?
Mr. Sato :
LINE WORKS provides every feature that we need for the collaboration and nothing was unnecessary. Especially, in the perspective of manipulability, we found that the integration happens so instinctively since LINE WORKS operating method was twin to that of LINE. ‘Read’ notification was also the core reason for the LINE WORKS integration. We have also compared LINE WORKS with the other competitive tools in the past. However, we found more advantages on LINE WORKS by actually operating the tool, and our employees were favorable to LINE WORKS, even during their trial period.
It is true that there are many free chatting tools. For the free tools, however, we were feeling unsure about the services available for the users. For example, we were specifically unsure about whether we could get supports when the issues occur during operation or not. Also, we were not even sure when this service will be terminated. When compared with free chatting tools available, we could ensure about the customer services provided by LINE WORKS, since we pay reasonable price. Such secureness has led us to introduce LINE WORKS to our company.
How exactly LINE WORKS is being used?
Mr. Haneuda :
We have created the chat rooms for each construction plan or project, and encouraged the employees to both share information and report the issue there. We are mainly utilizing LINE WORKS when reporting the construction status while working outside the office, or consulting the troubles occurred.
We do collaboratively work with other franchisee offices located in Saitama, Nagoya, and Doyama. Even with the physical distance, LINE WORKS enables us to instantly share the current status of the situation by sending photos or videos on the chatting room. With LINE WORKS, we can also download the structural drawings and continue our work smoothly in real time. Unlike computer, using smartphone version of LINE WORKS allows us to check the message straightaway. Further, we can notify and share information with a number of employees at once just by sending messages on the group chatting room, and we found that pretty efficient.
by sending photo
being approved
Mr. Sato :
After LINE WORKS adoption, the approval process on various estimates has become overwhelmingly faster than before. Up until now, employees had to write initial estimate by hands, and attach the copy of the estimate to the email and send it to the people related in order to get approvals. Because the approval was made in order, it took times to get the final approval from the CEO. Also, if CEO is on a business trip, it was inevitable to have delays in receiving the approval, and sometimes, the delay was even last for about a week. After LINE WORKS adoption, we open up a chatting room based on the agenda, invite all the employees related, and upload the estimate file to get approvals. Those who have joined the chat room can sign an approval on the document regardless of the approval order. Once the staff from the General Affairs find the estimate has received the approvals from everybody in the chatting room, the staff send the estimate. Even without turning on the computer but just using LINE WORKS on the smartphone, it allows us to easily make approvals on the document received, and we can also make approvals while on the business trip. With this, the speed of the overall working process has improved. What used to took a few days to process has now only take about a few hours to complete.
What are the effects after the introduction of LINE WORKS?
Mr. Sato :
After discouraging email communication between employees, we established a complete digital communication ecosystem by integrating LINE WORKS. As a result, the emailing rate has decreased dramatically. Instead, we found out that the rate of the productive and useful communication has increased. With this, the overall mood of the office has changed positively and actively. For example, if one of our employees send message saying that the order was successfully made, the others in the chatting room congrats the person by sending the messages like ‘Congratulations!’. I feel the great joy when feeling that we are all collaborating and sharing feelings.
We have also created the chatting room for newly entered employees. New employees are now instructed to write and upload their training report on LINE WORKS messenger. This way, it becomes much easier for the new employees to submit their report, as well as receive as many comments as possible from their colleagues, including the boss, who joined the chatting room. Receiving comments from the seniors would definitely help new employees to develop their career even better.
Mr. Ebi :
As LINE WORKS is fully aware of enterprise level of security requirements, we feel secured from company assets and data leakage. In the perspective of workflow, we are truly thankful to LINE WORKS with the effects to eliminate reports and contacts missing, and even eliminate the unnecessary work repetitions. As a result of transforming the email communication into LINE WORKS, we now can continue our communication with the same feeling of having conversations with the collaborators. Along with such sense, we feel that the overall communication and collaboration speed has become faster. As it becomes easier for every employee to share the ideas, ask for consultations, and even report easily, we are sure about that there are more chances available to have communication with one another.
Another limitation for using email was that it only allows us to send files with the maximum size of 5MB. For this reason, we had to divide the file and send several times of emails in order to send file that the size bigger than 5MB. After LINE WORKS adoption, what becomes the most comfortable is that we do not have to worry about the file sizes as LINE WORKS covers the size up to 100MB. Workflow has now economically changed by directly sending big sized files like videos, construction maps, and even program data on the LINE WORKS messenger. Employees no longer worry about making mistakes like miss out reference or attachments when writing emails. And this definitely is another advantage we gained from using LINE WORKS messenger.
By allowing us to open up the chatting rooms for each department or project, LINE WORKS assures that necessary information that we send through messenger will be sent to those whom it may concerned. If we use LINE WORKS messenger, we can simply write the core information, even without writing pointless introduction, or just send the file for the urgent matter. Previous communication history can also be comfortably checked and reviewed. Specifically, if one of our clients ask the question that we have discussed before, we can simply check the message by checking the archived conversation history. Since we are currently making the best utilization of LINE WORKS, we cannot even imagine us working without it. Moreover, close in the future, we would like to archive every portion of our company data and asset on LINE WORKS.
※ All details, affiliations, and positions specified were gathered at the time of interview.
