Work Style Reform
~ Improve Operations with Smart Mail “CORRESSA” ~
The topic of conversation everywhere seems to be work style reform. While there is much attention on making work more accessible for individuals, such as reducing overtime and increasing the rate of paid leave use, from a management perspective, the focus is on how to achieve increased labor productivity through operational improvement. CORRESSA’s smart mail solution offers a hint as to how IT can contribute to this management challenge.
Most business tasks are not completed solely at a desktop. They involve interactions with others, meaning they rely on communication. In Japan, communication tends to be narrowly interpreted as face-to-face interactions. However, in this context, it refers to a broader sense including phone, fax, and IT tools.
Recently, more companies and business users are exploring innovative ways of working by utilizing business SNS and chat tools. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has also strengthened the momentum for challenging new communication methods by distributing newsletters themed around “Work Style Reform × Business Use of Chat Tools.” It suggests that communication, a fundamentally human method, is still incomplete and has latent issues remaining.
Our company focuses on email, a representative communication tool. In corporate systems, email has established an unassailable position without its usefulness ever being questioned. Moreover, there are survey results indicating that the number of emails received daily by business users significantly exceeds individual processing capacity, and the number of emails tends to increase with higher positions. It seems that the narrative that business SNS and chat tools will wholly replace email as a business communication tool is not so straightforward.
Therefore, is email without challenges an all-powerful entity? Since communication is generally invisible, it is often not considered a theme for operational improvement. If we call the new work styles of individuals in the era of work style reform “smart work styles,” how should email evolve within them?
In our company, which specializes in project management, we engage in daily communication with clients such as landlords, construction companies, and partner companies in construction projects of high-tech production facilities like pharmaceutical factories, laboratories, medical device factories, semiconductor manufacturing facilities, and data centers.
In addition to the common communication concerns consulted by companies, here are some examples of operational improvements our company practices.
Issue: Due to the excessive number of emails, important messages are frequently overlooked
→ With the smart email “CORRESSA,” gather information by project and prioritize messages that need attention. Let’s declutter!
How many emails do you receive on average in a day? It’s not uncommon to meet executives who receive a three-digit number of emails. To efficiently process such a large volume of emails and understand the connection between original and reply emails later, many people categorize incoming emails into folders. I am one of them, but surprisingly, categorizing a large number of incoming emails has been found to be inefficient.
Is having a search engine instead of folder categorization a good solution? To validate personal databases, it might be an acceptable approach for personal optimization. Still, many companies are exploring other approaches for overall optimization if systematically aiming to improve intellectual productivity across the organization, such as with standardization.
In our company, which operates project-based businesses, we define projects as units for aggregating information. These include projects for facility construction, consulting projects for manufacturing processes, education projects within GMP (Pharmaceutical QMS), marketing support projects for Japanese pharmaceutical companies expanding into Southeast Asia, and management department-related projects for overseas subsidiaries, among others.
As we handle multiple projects simultaneously, how do we manage such large and diverse communication information? One of the secrets lies in our in-house developed smart email, “CORRESSA.”
Don’t you think that communication efficiency would improve if it became easier to understand which communication information should be read and processed first (as opposed to “which to delay”)?
Issue: Tasks outsourced to other companies are often delayed, and there are concerns about them being ignored.
→ With the smart email “CORRESSA,” schedule management becomes an automated service!
Communication can be categorized by the method, such as F2F meetings, phone/fax, and emails, or by the content, such as notifications, requests, and inquiries. In projects, the key points are not only to reliably communicate to the other party but also to ensure that instructions and requests are completed by the deadline. For example, the content might be, “Please update the document as indicated. The deadline is [date].”
In traditional project management, how were such requests managed? Many project managers likely juggled between emails and Excel spreadsheets.
With emails, once you write the instruction or request in the text body, it ends there—often forgotten or overlooked as mere text.
In response, it was common to manually create an Excel file summarizing the recipient, content, and deadlines, and then contact each time a delay was noticed.
The responsibility of the project manager, as the issuer, is to not just give instructions/requests and leave it at that, but to follow up until the task is completed. This is our company’s basic approach as we specialize in project management.
In addition to being a personal log (tasks that need to be done as the logged-in user), our in-house developed smart email “CORRESSA” enables us to list and manage all tasks for everyone involved in the relevant project.
For executives managing multiple projects and issuing instructions internally and externally, relying solely on traditional email to monitor task statuses in real-time and prompt for delays is increasingly challenging.
We believe that communication tools to convey information and thoughts to others should be used according to their nature. Knowing how to differentiate between each communication tool—business SNS, chat tools, traditional email, and smart email—based on their respective characteristics will likely become a differentiation point in each company’s information strategy.