Chiyoda Corporation

ABeam Consulting has been providing support to Chiyoda Corporation since its implementation of SAP in 2012. Having highly rated ABeam Consulting’s end-to-end support from planning to execution and our ability to make compelling proposals, Chiyoda Corporation commissioned us to begin supporting its promotion of talent management, one of its key corporate DX measures, from December 2022. Chiyoda Corporation held discussions involving not only corporate departments but also people on the ground, under the leadership of ABeam Consulting, then organized the challenges it was facing in talent management as follows.

1. Addressing the issue of the generation gap and of inter-generational succession
Chiyoda Corporation has a generation gap in its current personnel make up, and, in particular, as mid-level employees retire (generational hollowing out), it has had inadequate passing on of the know-how and specialist knowledge needed to operate the organization. If this state of affairs persists, it will create an impediment to the future functioning of the organization, and risks undermining the competitiveness of Chiyoda as a company. For this reason, the development of the next-generation of leaders and specialists has become a pressing task.

2. Securing and developing personnel suited to the business strategy
Chiyoda Corporation needs to expand EPC to new areas and establish a sustainable model of business in order to realize its business strategy. It was essential for the company to capture and develop personnel suited to business development in particular, in order to respond to fierce competition, necessitating the formulation of a plan for securing and developing appropriate talent.

3. Optimization and surfacing of deployments
At present, assignments to projects are often based on individual interpersonal relations and tacit knowledge, and progress has not been made on optimizing this company-wide. For this reason, there is room to improve in the direction of having assignments that contribute to deploying people in an optimal way across the entire company and to “autonomous careers” in which employees can head in the direction that they want to grow. This necessitates the creation of systems that enable the surfacing of personnel information and the assignment of people based on data. In addition, if employees are assigned to work for which they have relatively little motivation, proper talent management can visualize for them how they can make use of the experience and skills they gain through the assignment in their future careers at Chiyoda Corporation. Employees can thereby be given the chance to notice career paths that they themselves might not have been able to imagine, with the company thus seeking to improve their motivation.

4. Creating an environment in which employees and the company can work together to foster careers
In a business environment in which diverse changes occur, there is a need for employees to be able to think through and grow their own careers autonomously. In this context, companies also need to understand the career aspirations of their employees and provide them with suitable opportunities for growth while maintaining dialogue. There is also a need for companies to prepare environments in which employees can, in thinking about their careers, understand that there are expansive opportunities for them within the company and thus foster “flexible mindsets” that let them excel in diverse fields, and thereby become able to realize their ideal career paths.

ABeam Consulting provided end-to-end support for everything from planning to execution and operations. By providing support for all processes, ABeam was able to consider everything up to systematization in line with operational objectives or flexibly course-correct, even if there were changes to the initial direction or unexpected requirements came up. This allowed us to drive the realization of value for users. In addition, we contributed to the implementation of talent management that can be utilized by all employees by working side by side with the company to make improvements and drive further upgrades to usability, taking into account the data utilization, status and operating status of the system, even after it was launched. Furthermore, by making use of our unique framework, leveraging our experience in building large-scale core systems using a low-code platform (OutSystems), which serves as our implementation architecture, we managed to implement talent empowerment that cannot be achieved using generic packages, and that goes beyond the bounds of traditional talent management, while limiting the implementation period.

To understand where the company is aiming to be and think through how to realize that in its digital technology aspects, while also being aware of the operations that would be needed to achieve those goals, required perspectives coming from multiple angles. By working closely with the client and examining and thinking through issues together, ABeam formulated a general direction that sought to maximize “individual activity,” which is being focused on as the current project. Standout among those efforts were the following contributions.

• ABeam proactively engaged on-the-ground departments at the front lines of talent utilization in discussions and devised a vision for talent management together with key people in talent management at each department. We gained an understanding of the characteristics and key points of operations across headquarters and each department and incorporated talent utilization perspectives that could be directly tied to business applications.
• We formulated an execution plan that not only sketched out an ideal case of “what we should do in making use of cutting-edge technology?,” but also struck an overall balance that was conscious of operating burdens and cost aspects, took practical solutions into consideration and thought through problems together with others, in a context of there being no single right answers and diverse perspectives.

In terms of future outlook, we aspire to be able to centrally manage all remaining elements that make up talent, including skills and competencies, on this platform. In doing so, we are also looking at making proactive use of AI technology and using it to maintain the freshness of data through automatic data gathering. Going forward, by deploying the system to group companies, we also hope to achieve broader and more flexible assignments and more dynamic personnel deployments. We also hope to expand opportunities for employees to excel and to build schemes that help them want to express themselves in their careers through better visualization. We also aim to build future-ready talent management operations in which the company and its employees can engage in a lively back and forth.