TOYOTSU SYSCOM CORPORATION

From 2004, beginning with its European subsidiaries and continuing to expand to all countries over more than 10 years, the operation and maintenance of SAP systems for local subsidiaries (WEST) has been performed by a team of Japanese professionals from multiple SI vendors, under the leadership of TOYOTSU SYSCOM CORPORATION. However, as more and more members with the English skills and operational knowledge to be involved in roll outs were redeployed to deployment projects, barriers emerged in terms of communication and operational understanding between the remaining operations and maintenance team and key users in each country, stemming from language, location and time difference issues. As a result, the team needed longer lead times to address inquiries from users or change requests, so there was a deterioration in service quality, with the team only able to offer surface-level answers, and user satisfaction declined to a lower level.

ABeam Consulting got involved from the 2013 WEST upgrade. Since that time, as we executed on feature extension and European deployment projects, we have been credited for our understanding of the WEST system and our ability to address global issues, which is how, from 2015, we came to provide support for formulating a vision for the operations and maintenance system.

While working on the vision for operations and maintenance, multiple candidate countries for where to transfer operations were raised. These included Singapore, Toyota Tsusho’s regional HQ, Malaysia and China, global outsourcing sites for ABeam Consulting, and Thailand, a major business site for Toyota Tsusho. We ultimately settled on Thailand for the following reasons.

1. Importance as a business site
As the most important location for Toyota Tsusho in business terms, Thailand handled a wide array of operations. We decided we could most improve operational understanding by placing the site closer to users.

2. Generating synergies
We managed to gain synergies by making use of personnel from Toyota Tsusho Systems (Thailand), an affiliated company of TOYOTSU SYSCOM, and by working with personnel from ABeam Consulting Thailand.

When transferring operations and maintenance work, we began by taking stock of and organizing necessary documentation, using our own ABeam Method established operations methodology. Next, after performing knowledge transfer and deepening the team members’ understanding of operations, we created opportunities to perform shadowing and reverse shadowing during actual work, and for overseas team members to visit Japan and learn directly from the current team.

We moved forward with a stepped transfer, depending on the degree of difficulty of the work. We performed gate checks at each phase, so that we could reliably transfer the operations while minimizing risks.

Transferring operations and maintenance work to Thailand helped facilitate better communication with users. At the same time as we improved operational understanding by organizing the information needed during operations and maintenance work. As a result, we improved the pre-transition average satisfaction scores of 3.6 (out of 6) to 4.0 post transfer. As the new team’s mastery of operations has improved, this has climbed to 4.5 in recent years. In the Southeast Asia and India locations, where it is particularly easy for users to speak to the team directly, we have achieved an average of 5.0.
Additionally, as part of our program management support for development projects, we have created a unified PM team with the client, contributing to the smooth progress of projects, including coordination of requirements with overseas branches.