*The name of G Suite was changed to Google Workspace in October 2020
Q. What kind of operations do you use Questetra for?
Impress Group is a Media Enterprise group with more than a dozen subsidiaries, such as IT-related publisher Impress Japan Corp., etc. Through digital media and publishing media we provide content plus high-value-added services, according to today’s needs. (Tokyo Stock Exchange 9479)
Today, in addition to IT and PC related publications, the group sells a wide range of the content related to music, design, mountains and nature to name a few, and Impress Holding, Inc. takes care of the procurement of infrastructure and allocation of business resources.
We have introduced the Cloud-based Workflow system (Questetra) as a tool to control IT as a part of internal control reinforcement, and also as a tool to achieve operational efficiency.
Q. What kind of ‘IT control’ do you refer to?
In the Impress Group about 600 employees are using various business systems. These systems are of various types and purposes, from editing content to service providing and customer data management.
From the perspective of business process control, it is important to prevent mistakes by ensuring the appropriate use of these business systems. In addition, the business systems themselves must be managed properly.
Previously, the procedure for granting system use permissions had been carried out on paper. The requests for changes in system access due to hiring, resignations or employee transfers had been carried out by the Personnel Department or the person responsible at each subsidiary, but I must say there were various problems, such as:
- Changes went unnoticed due to documents getting stuck somewhere during the paperwork processing
- Difficulty searching for past procedure records
- It took a long time to audit the implementation of the internal control
Now that the paperwork process has been digitized, the system usage authorization can be updated daily. In addition, the automatic recording of updates has made it easier to provide an audit trail, which has significantly reduced the cost of responding to internal control audits. I also think that the operational efficiency of the IT Systems Department has improved greatly.
Q. What was important for you to select a Workflow System?
Indeed, the digitization of our procedures was important, but I wanted to clarify the workflow. I was wondering how I could get an overview of the entire workflow system. In fact, I found Questetra while searching for images of business flow charts.
I think there are wonderful features that other products don’t have, such as the capability to set conditional expressions and to send emails to any destination at points in the workflow diagram, or the Swimlane function to automate the allocation to the person in charge of each step. I expect that the handover of operations whenever there is a change in personnel will become much easier if I can model all of the workflow diagrams on the BPM System.
Q. Is there any other important feature?
During the introduction of the workflow system, the ability to cooperate with G Suite was important. Connection configurations with G Suite were very easy, and we were able to link Questetra and G Suite in no time. We plan to continue with the application business processes in the areas of HR & Administration in the future.
Moreover, we aim to link more than one domain. We would like Questetra to have a feature to manage multiple domains like G Suite does, instead of operating Questetra on each domain separately. We are looking forward to that.
