When the enterprise qualifications of Cloud Computing are questioned, there is an increasing number of real world examples that disprove that it's not something that major organisations should have on their corporate agenda. At the forefront of this list is Japan Post, which boasts the largest Salesforce.com implementation in the world.
In the most recent Salesforce.com financial results announcement, the firm's CEO Marc Benioff singled Japan Post out as a prime example of The Cloud in action: “I'm pleased to announce that Japan Post has extended their deployment by another 5,000 subscribers, to push their total deployment to roughly 65,000. Japan Post continues to be our largest Force.com platform deployment in the world.”
Formerly a public corporation Japan Post commenced a a ten-year privatisation process in October 2007, something which has been facilitated by the adoption of SaaS. In addition to selling stamps and delivering mail, Japan Post serves as a savings bank and provider of financial products to individuals, and is said to be the largest financial institution in the world in terms of asset holdings.
Salesforce.com's on-demand service, implemented by NTT Data, is intended to enable Japan Post's financial sales agents to leverage customer-approved personal information for proposing and cross-selling appropriate services and financial products to the Japanese public nationwide. The organisation has also used Hitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd. (HitachiSoft), a Salesforce.com partner in Japan, to develop a custom, on-demand application for reporting customer inquiries and compliance-related issues .
So with Japan Post established as a poster child for SaaS, what were the drivers behind the roll-out? “Japan Post was privatised in October 2007,” says Akira Iwasaki, Force.com Chief Innovation Officer at Japan Post. “Japan Post has been divided into separate companies, including banking, a postal network and the holding company. The postal network, for example, is the sales arm of Japan Post with 24,000 offices and 120,000 people throughout Japan.
“We were in a hurry to implement systems in a short time and we didn't have any development resources that could cope. “For front end customer-facing applications, SaaS is good thanks to our lack of resources and skills to develop them ourselves. We were a public sector organisation so we never really developed those skills. If Japan Post didn't use SaaS, we would have to look at outsourcing and compared to outsourcing SaaS is cheaper. We chose to go with a SaaS solution.
The Salesforce.com implementation to date has been focused on 3 main applications. “One application is to capture the customer voice in such a way that can be analysed at corporate headquarters,” explains Iwasaki. “This includes things like complaints which can be analysed at headquarters and then have the offices use it. Then there is the customer management systems, which isn't a full-fledged CRM system, but is used to cross-sell."
Permission granted
"Since the company was divided up, products like insurance and financial products are cross-sold. To do that, we need permission from customers. Once that permission is gained, we store it in the application and an index is created for the sales teams to use. This index has data that is used by the bank, by the sales division and by the various companies within Japan Post. The third application, which we have just started recently. is used to gather data on each post office. It hold fundamental basic data and each post office as well as the sales people can see their data.”
Japan Post is not stopping here however with further applications scheduled for roll-out in specific functional areas. “We are currently looking at 20 applications for deployment, all sales-related,” says Iwasaki. “The priority levels for SaaS accounting and HR applications are pretty low. Given that that we were a public sector organisation, the regulations for HR were very stringent. For example we can't move HR data outside the organisation.”
Salesforce.com's Benioff last year identified Japan as a major growth area for SaaS take-up, a point of view with which Iwasaki agrees. “The sense that SaaS is easier to use and deploy is growing in Japan, especially among small and medium sized companies,” he says. “For the larger enterprises, there's a sense that SaaS solutions might be more viable.”
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