The company has parallelized multiple consultation processes prior to approval in a series of decision-making operations: order receiving, purchasing, and HR (human resources). That has helped the company’s decision-making improve five-fold.
Q. What kind of work are you using Questetra for?
We, JTB GLOBAL ASSISTANCE INC. have contracts with clients mainly in the financial, non-life insurance, and travel industry, to support their customers. We provide our clients’ customers with consulting services related to domestic and overseas travel, various information related to travel, troubleshooting during travel, and tourist information at travel destinations.
The company is building a system to provide these services with a call center operating 24/7 and a network of 56 cities inside and outside Japan.
We use Questetra mainly for decision-making operations on order receiving, purchasing, and HR.
Q. What did you struggle with in the decision-making operation?
We faced a growing need to make decisions as fast as possible to respond quickly to ever-changing business environments. At that time, Questetra was recommended through consultation with companies in the group.
In the decision-making flow, we have a number of «approval» and «consultation» operations before an approval document is created. «Consultation» is a task where the general managers of the relevant departments confirm the contents of the document and add their opinions to it from their own positions.
There are many people involved in «Approval» and «Consultation» operations and they pass the document among them, which consequently requires a week to 10 days to be approved.
After installing Questetra, the content of the document can be passed electronically among the parties which improve searchability and allows us to reuse past consultation data. Fundamentally rethinking the decision-making flow, especially parallelizing the «Consultation» Task, can significantly shorten the decision making time.
Before installing Questetra, the General Affairs Department manager chose some people for a consultative role and they passed the document among themselves. With Questetra, we reorganized the decision-making flow so that multiple consultants can receive the document at the same time and process the «Consultation» Task at any time.
This has significantly reduced the processing time in the «Consultation» Task, which can now be completed within a day or two.
Q. Can you feel other effects?
Yes, we can feel significant effects in other sections as well.
One of them is the reduction of the time required for business and accounting audits. In the order receiving and purchasing tasks, their decision-making records are checked in detail. In the past we used paper for all records, so when an audit was conducted we had to line up a number of document files and search for the information to be audited. Now with Questetra, we can do that on a PC and find information sooner.
Another effect is the improvement of security. In HR decision-making we have to handle sensitive information and we must be careful about leaks before disclosure. In paper operations, we have to be meticulous about secure storage space for approval documents that contain sensitive information. When the approver and a consultant were in another office, we exchanged the approval document with them via inter-office mail. We had a concern about leakage or loss during transportation. With Questetra, we no longer exchange the document via internal mail and that concern has been eliminated.
Q. What are you planning in the future?
We use Questetra for other tasks such as accepting target sheets for assessment or voting for the selection of employee representatives, etc. We have many employees who don’t have e-mail addresses and Questetra requires an email address to create an ID, but we know it has a function (Form Start) that accepts input of information without an ID. With this function, we can also receive sensitive information (such as personal goals and appointment selections) from employees who don’t have e-mail addresses.
Although we are using Questetra for various operations, we have a request: a workshop. We know Questetra offers many useful features, including automatic PDF file generation and automatic upload of files to Microsoft OneDrive. However, It is hard to master these functions by ourselves, so we would like you to hold a regular 30-minute workshop. We believe that will help reduce our learning costs and we’ll be more proactive in using Questetra to improve our tasks.
In the future, we would like to improve the flow of concluding contracts by integrating it with cloud-based contract management software. Questetra has enabled us to digitize a lot of our operations, but it hasn’t digitized the entire flow. This is also a request, but we hope to easily integrate with cloud-based contract management software in the future.
