Konoike Transport Takes "Cloud First" Strategy with Smartsheet, Successfully Migrates a Large-Scale Management System

Konoike Transport Co., Ltd. ("Konoike Transport") provides logistic and contracting services for a diverse set of fields, spanning from metal to food products, lifestyle, medical, and even airports. It boasts total annual sales of 311.8 billion yen (fiscal year ended March, 2023). With more than 200 business locations in Japan and overseas, the company is a major player supporting global economics. It has become widely known as a group of professionals who continue to take on the challenges of solving social issues and innovation. 

The company began the work on DX (digital transformation) in 2018. The ICT Promotion Division was formed after recruiting an external talent as the new IT department head. It takes the “cloud first” strategy with the purpose of improving the productivity by migrating the work system to the cloud. Smartsheet was the tool adopted as a part of the strategy. Sato, who joined the company 2018 when the reforms began, has heavily involved as the Head of the Digital Transformation Enablement Division, ICT Enablement Office, reflects on the background of the adoption of Smartsheet as follows:

“Several projects were launched as an enabler of the reforms, but employees created WBS and Gantt charts using Excel, all communications being conducted over email. File versions were managed on these tools, as well. This method had several problems, such as causing an excess of files, and unable to easily see the overall progress of projects. It also made it difficult to seamlessly share the latest information. With Smartsheet, information can be visualized and shared online, and projects are more efficiently managed. I used Smartsheet at my previous workplace as well and knew of its convenience and functionality, so I decided to adopt it and encouraged the ICT members to use it. The primary reason we picked Smartsheet is its efficiency. We did not even need to compare it against other products. ”

The Management System for Approximately 60 Locations Migrated to a Cloud in 4 Months

Full utilization of Smartsheet began with the warehouse management / WMS system migration project. Traditionally, the company used an on-premises warehouse management / WMS system in approximately 60 locations, but decided to migrate the system to AWS. Smartsheet played a significant role in this process.

“The migration project was split into nine teams, and many employees involved. Each location had its own characteristics, so the members who were familiar with their place managed the project. However, in order for the cloud migration to succeed, information had to be shared horizontially as well, therefore it was essential for the entire team to understand up-to-date statuses, progressions, and future plans. In that regard, Smartsheet played a significant role as we were able to visualize all of the information. When migrating the system, a total of 200 sheets were aggregated into Smartsheet. The members involved in the project could not help but to admit the usefulness of Smartsheet. ”

Not only was there a four-month deadline for the system migration, but it had to be done on holiday nights when the warehouses were not in operation.

“As the logistics service is the core business for us, we could not stop our day-to-day operations at any cost. Any service disruption will affect all sectors of society and even the general public, causing other disruptions. For a project that would normally take over a year., four months was also quite a difficult deadline. It would not be an exaggeration to say that overcoming these two hurdles and successfully leading the large-scale system migration project was all thanks to precise management enabled by Smartsheet. ”

The Best Tool to Enable DX and Change Thinking within the Company

Aside from information visualization and sharing, Sato says Smartsheet has plenty of practical templates online, allowing project management to start immediately just by inputting data such as the date, being able to easily use form functions that can gather questions, answers, or information, and making linking with external tools such as Slack easier as its specialties. He also claimed that through actual reform work, he noticed even further benefits of Smartsheet.

“There are other project management tools, but quite a few employees had not used anything other than Excel. Some never even knew the idea of project management. A tool can have many functionalities, but adopting it in our circumstance would cause workplace confusion if it's difficult to use. From this perspective, Smartsheet is similar to but more than just Excel. It is far easier to use, plus it can do many more things. Even employees who are not tech savvy can use it without issue, therefore I believe it is the best tool for the transition phase in DX. ”

“What I can say for sure having been involved, is that it brought about the reform mindset within the company. For example, when we set the “cloud first” guidelines, some employees understood the strategy and words themselves, but didn’t understand the actual implication and how things will move forward. However, by executing the important project using Smartsheet, many workers came to understand the DX itself, and the organization as a whole became more positive towards the work reforms. In this manner as well, I feel the adoption of Smartsheet enabled huge results. ”

Currently, the ICT division has 30 employees. While they continue the DX work, the company is tring to recruit new ideas on how to use Smartsheet better. In conclusion, Sato talked his ambitions for the future:    

“Smartsheet was the solution adopted in the first period of the ‘cloud first’ strategy, and I believe it brought about a fair amount of big results considering the visualization and real-time sharing of all kinds of data. It also played a big rolde in improving the productivity. Smartsheet would be further utilized in many domains, so I will highly recommend other internal divisions and other operations to use it. ”