1. Issue : Cost of responding to progress inquiries

The Taketori Company is a long-established company in Kyoto. With five employees, they make and sell bamboo crafts. The quality and craftsmanship of their bamboo crafts are highly regarded, and they receive many orders from customers.

However, at the same time there were frequent inquiries about progress, which began to interfere with the company’s original duties of quality control. In particular, as the delivery date approached there was a tendency that calls to check on progress would increase, which was taking up a great deal of time and effort.

2. Solution : Automatic delivery notification

The process owner added an email sending event to the workflow app.

With this process improvement, they are now able to automatically notify customers that products have been shipped as soon as the finished product passes in-house inspection.

*This process improvement story is fictional and has no relation to any real people or organizations.

3. Effects

Business Efficiency

• The number of phone calls to check progress has been significantly reduced, work efficiency has improved, and productivity has increased.
• The time and effort required to answer phone calls has been reduced, resulting in reduced personnel costs and telephone charges.
• This allows us to concentrate on our core duties of quality control and developing new customers.

Improve Customer Satisfaction

• Customers can now track the status of their product shipments, eliminating anxiety and stress.
• We have been able to build trusting relationships (business partnerships) with our customers.
• Customer satisfaction has improved significantly, leading to an increase in repeat business.

Improve Employee Motivation

• Employees who were freed from the tedious task of checking progress were more motivated.
• The information that the product had passed the in-house inspection was shared with the sales department, accelerating upselling activities.

4. Other Business Applications

Process progress notifications during workflow can also be applied to other departmental operations.

Quote Submission Process

• Automatically notify the company when there is a change in the deal status
• Send reminders to customers 24 hours after submitting a quote (quote expiration date, payment method, etc.)

Inquiry Handling Process

• When receiving an inquiry from a customer, automatically send a copy of the receipt
• When a response is pending, automatically send an email to the customer with the expected response date to the inquiry.

Quality Control Process

• Automatic notification of quality inspection results and the progress of improvement measures
• Real-time sharing of quality improvement initiatives to raise company-wide quality awareness