A single local staff member made 60 admin positions paperless! Freed from the burden of signing, employees can now leave the office.
Company Name : Travel Book Philippines, Inc.
Job Details: Online reservation service for hotels in the Philippines.
Workers: 2 Japanese workers, 124 Filipino workers (regular employees)
■Manager Information
Name: Nakazawa
Position: General Manager
Assigned: April, 2014
Work in Japan: Sales and Planning, IT Implementation
Experience: None
Name: Lorbie Esguerra
Branch: General Affairs
Position: Head of Operations Planning, IT Implementation
Experience: None
kintone Usage and Experience
Started with implementations in call centers and accounting. Following its success, it was implemented in admin work in half a year.
Result of Implementation
- Reduced the amount of paperwork handled by staff in a day from around 30-50 sheets to zero. Just incredible.
- Staff members can now leave the office.
- Admin duties can now be easily handled by two or fewer staff members.
- Internal and accounting audit responses can now be displayed solely using kintone.
- Greatly reduced communication costs with staff.
Issues Prior to Implementation
“There’d be about 30-50 pieces of submission paperwork from staff per day, which required returning to the office to sign. It was difficult for us to leave the office without keeping someone around on staff.” (Nakazawa)
Signatures are often required for purchase paperwork, business trip and refund requests, meaning someone always had to be in the office.
It was also common to see employees walking around the office with paperwork, and planning for trips and vacation time was difficult.
There was an actual approval box. Now they’re completely paperless, and all that remains are a few forms for outside work. Before we would accumulate 30-50 a day.
Maintaining communication with staff members responsible for submissions was challenging, as well. For example, if the contents of a non-standard submission differed from company policy, directly confirming why a particular decision was made with staff was quite troublesome.
There are other chat tools with a high usage rate in Southeast Asia, of course, but OK’ing chats with everyone on staff required 1-on-1 communication with every person in the company, so they couldn’t use them. By moving submissions from paper to kintone, they were able to significantly reduce communication costs, and also bundle comments with submission paperwork. Since communications are public within the company (unlike chats), returning to and searching for previous communications is now much easier.
They also said that running checks and audits was very difficult.
When managing things with paper only, it took time to find the correct form from the large number of files, and there were also occasional incidents when files were lost. By moving to kintone, approval history is built into the system, making it fast and easy to find the forms employees are looking for.
Candidate Products
We asked Nakazawa if he considered any other products or methods during the deliberation process.
“None. kintone was the only choice. We’d tried to create an SFA system from scratch before, which had significant development and management costs. When we realized how financially affordable and flexible kintone was, we made the decision to go with it immediately.”
Points of Consideration
We also asked about what they spent most of their time considering, which are summarized below:
- Cost
- Whether or not it would be simple enough for users familiar with Excel to create apps with it. (Would the current staff be able to field requests with it?)
- Whether it would be usable for admin work outside of customer management.
Experienced User Advice
To wrap things up, we asked for some advice to prospective kintone clients.
“Don’t do it yourself. If you have a local staff member who’s familiar with operations and knows Excel, let them handle things.”
“When requests come in, it’s important to order the staff not to use paper for authorizations and to get rid of the authorization box entirely.”
“Training the staff in using the system on the implementation process is essential. Either ask the staff in charge of implementation, or request for a fee at a kintone official location.
