Mr. Ono：

Located in Kanagawa, our company operates the visiting rehabilitation massage business by a masseur who owns national certificate. We also operate stress-relieving salon that lessens daily tiredness or muscle stiffness using five senses and other related business. We are operating 8 visiting rehabilitation massage stores and 5 stress-relieving salon stores.

Mr. Takeuchi：

I am part of the General Affairs Department, and responsible for managing the company’s vehicle, PCs, and company borrowed cellular phones.

Mr. Hasegawa：

I am in charge of visiting rehabilitation massage business. In addition, I visit customer’s house as a masseur and I manage the schedule of staff members as head of the office, simultaneously.

Mr. Ono：

The number of employees who were only a few at the company’s foundation year in 2000 has now grown up to 130 employees. As the company’s size grew year after year, we believed that the speed of communication would become more important than before. Also, we value people as we put a company’s fundamental policy. Especially, in hopes of improving capacity and becoming outstanding individuals, we actively have been conducting the training workshop for executive staffs.

We all felt that, in order to work faster, it is important to make quick responses to the contacts. We think that there are limitations to enhance response rates using communication tools like email or telephone. Until now, the employees have used bulletin boards on the company’s website installed by each Department manager. Field employees, those who have hard time to meet each other due to different work time, used company’s SNS to contact each other. We thought that introducing a convenient communication tool may enhance communication speed than before.

Mr. Hasegawa：

It was only morning hours that I can physically meet the employees. For this reason, I basically contacted them through company mobile phone or personal mobile phone. However, I often felt uncomfortable with this due to time limitation.

Mr. Takeuchi：

We have used SMS since we rented out 2G phones to our employees up until now. However, I felt that SMS as well as 2G phones were inconvenient to use because contacts need to be re-registered every time when device changes.

Mr. Takeuchi：

In the fall of 2017, the company introduced LINE WORKS as we changed the company rental mobile phone from 2G phone to smartphone. LINE WORKS, an application available both on the PC and smartphone, was very attractive because we wanted to create an environment where office employees can easily communicate with field employees. I looked over several different tools. However, I gave up on introducing them because employees were unable to get used to them in the trial and there was a need for the training session in order to make every employee member be proficient.

Mr. Hasegawa：

LINE WORKS provides video call feature, and it has been a crucial factor to introduce it since Mr. Ono wanted to hold a video conference. LINE WORKS, unlike other traditional communication tools, was also very attractive because it provides Read notification feature to find out whether a message has been read or not.

Mr. Ono：

When we introduce LINE WORKS, the internal IT Department set up rules such as ‘Messages that arrive after 8 p.m. can be answered the next morning’ or ‘No need to use closing remarks at the end of the message’ to make LINE WORKS usage pleasant. In addition, each business unit came up with different ideas to make a variety of uses of LINE WORKS.

Mr. Ono：

Currently, a total of 32 employees in administrative positions like senior executives, director of each sales office, and store manager are using LINE WORKS. we can send opinions to the executives easily as well as accommodate with executives’ opinion better than before. Also, there are executives who exchange personal information like ‘My baby has born’ or upload company PR videos via LINE WORKS to share information actively. Our company values ‘A well-communicated environment’ as the most important measure and we think that LINE WORKS is making a huge contribution to create such environment. Up until now, we have been hearing from employees through face to face interviews or written survey. However, I think we will be able to take advantage of LINE WORKS Form functions near in the future.

Mr. Hasegawa：

If the customer is in bad condition and cancel the visiting schedule on that day, we need to make contact immediately to field employees, who are assigned to visit the customer’s house. We can make contacts faster through LINE WORKS than by phone or email. Also, if the sent messages are notified as read, we can assure that ‘the recipients have read the message’, even if there is no reply.

There are times when we care for customers with a team of external physical therapists or occupational therapists whom are contracted by care managers. And we are mostly using LINE WORKS to make connection to their LINE account and exchange information in real time. Up to this point, the telephone calls have been central to our communication. But, there was a limited amount of time to receive the call and communicate through the phone. Therefore, we often had to call several times to find the most suitable time for communication. After the introduction of LINE WORKS, communication became smoother.Also, we can share customer’s health status and family situations on team’s group chatting room, which enables to achieve care system with better customer satisfaction measurement.

Mr. Takeuchi：

Because LINE WORKS enables us to find out whether the message has been read or not, we can make decisions faster than before. If an emergency situation occurs at the field we visit, we have to contact our boss about the issue and ask for the solution. When doing so, if we find out the message is not read by the boss, we can immediately make judgement to contact another boss and ask for the resolution. And this is very convenient.

Mr. Takeuchi：

LINE WORKS made company’s overall communication more active than before because it is easier to express an opinion than email or telephone. In order to confirm each other’s opinion, we use LINE WORKS, which has fast response speed and we can use the appropriate tool for purpose with the contact that needs searching or accumulation can be done by email.

Mr. Hasegawa：

We have discussed various company-level agendas such as new plans and responses through face-to-face meetings. But, now we are actively using LINE WORKS Message function to do so. As a result, face-to-face meetings have turned from a discussion to decision making and final confirmation, allowing more time to spend efficiently. The introduction of LINE WORKS created an atmosphere for the new director to express their opinion freely.

Mr. Ono：

We believe that the adoption of LINE WORKS enabled us to achieve a ‘well-communicated environment = better working environment’ and strengthened the connection between our executives. As more and more employees are now expressing their opinions, I think I can hear about them more when compared with past years. Communication and decision-making procedures are certainly faster than before, and we expect that these changes can lead us to better performance in the future.

Mr. Takeshi：

Our company is a welfare-related business that operated more than 200 nursing facilities and care homes in Saitama, Tokyo, and Kanagawa. I am at the business management department, which mainly focuses on operations management. In our company, there is a System Department and the main job is to manage company network maintenance, nursing fee charge, accounting system planning and management. ICT maintenance has just taken its first step. So, the president Miyazawa asked me to take charge of ICT related planning and implementation. For this reason, I am in charge of the introduction of LINE WORKS.

Mr. Kunio：

Our company is divided into three different headquarters, Saitama, Saikyo and Kanagawa. I am a member of the operations department of the Saikyo Headquarters. There are seven supervisors in the operations department and I work with them to manage about 70 offices in the Saikyo headquarters. Up to this point, we have been communicating mostly by phone or e-mail. There were some employees using their personal LINE accounts. But, due to security policy issues, the company did not recommend using LINE accounts. Whereas, LINE was convenient when you have to contact in a hurry. For this reason, I was worried that I could not ban LINE unconditionally. For example, if you call a sales representative, he or she will not be able to answer the call while that sales representative is driving or with a facility attendance. Even if I send an e-mail, I could not verify whether the receiver has read or not so information was not delivered smoothly. In addition, there were some misunderstandings in the process of one employee delivers a message to another employee like a relay. And sometimes information got lost in the middle so our task was to adapt communication tool that enabled accurate information sharing.

Mr. Takeshi：

Up to this point, we have been communicating mostly by phone or e-mail. There were some employees using their personal LINE accounts. But, due to security policy issues, the company did not recommend using LINE accounts. Whereas, LINE was convenient when you have to contact in a hurry. For this reason, I was worried that I could not ban LINE unconditionally. For example, if you call a sales representative, he or she will not be able to answer the call while that sales representative is driving or with a facility attendance. Even if I send an e-mail, I could not verify whether the receiver has read or not so information was not delivered smoothly. In addition, there were some misunderstandings in the process of one employee delivers a message to another employee like a relay. And sometimes information got lost in the middle so our task was to adapt communication tool that enabled accurate information sharing.

Mr. Yuichi：

The purpose of LINE WORKS was to provide candid communication between the superior and staff member. Employees can get close to someone who has been difficult to communicate with. Before joining ALSOK group, ‘Top-Down’ culture existed in our company because the founder was the CEO. In the nursing business, the most important thing is work done in the field. So, it is our job to listen to the field staffs and make the working condition better. But because I was in the manager position, which is difficult to find our information besides peripheral information. I wanted to hear the real voice on the field.

Mr. Takeshi：

While we were providing mobile phones and tablet computers to outside workers like headquarters, manager of headquarters, sales representative and supervisors, we changed mobile phones to smartphones in the fall of 2016. When I was thinking of adopting a more work-friendly chatting tool that can be easily used on smartphones, one of our telecommunications companies introduced LINE WORKS to me. I found this tool was originally made for the company and therefore, security features were well-established. This led me to feel assured about integrating LINE WORKS to our company.Moreover, this tool has the same UI with that of LINE. This implied that there would be no trouble in terms of availability. I made a decision to adopt LINE WORKS after having a conversation with President Miyazawa and we did not have to review the other chatting tools.

Mr. Takeshi：

As we prepared for the adoption, about five employees, including Mr. Miyazawa and I, used LINE WORKS first and checked manual or application methods. We prepared by organizing the order of use and etc. by the manual. About a month later, we introduced LINE WORKS to 95 employees. Once LINE WORKS fully introduced to employees, we encouraged employees with less activity on LINE WORKS to use more frequently. Employees who do not send messages first or in areas where it is unnecessary to keep in close contact, there may need to make urgent contact through LINE WORKS so it is It is important to encourage employees to understand the information in advance.

Mr. Takeshi：

Specific use cases for LINE WORKS are daily reporting, contact, and consultation related to work. I think more than 50 percent of the information that I have been sharing by phone or e-mail have been exchanged by LINE WORKS. Not only you can share your work progress at once, but also you can assure that you have confirmed it with ‘read’ sign on message even you did not get a reply. Because message com in text-form, other employees think they don’t have to take notes and this reduced simple verification errors.

Also, I like the fact that you can exchange small talk with LINE WORKS, which is hard to do with computer mail. I also find difficulty facing with my superior but the president Yuichi is actively using stickers in LINE WORKS in order to change the company’s communication in a casual direction.

We also created a group to share supplies. Up to this point, if a single business place had closed and generated large quantities of supplies that had to be disposed of, it had been disposed of as industrial waste. In contrast, if we opened a new business office, we were buying the supplies we needed each time. It was a cost-effective procedure for both the disposal and the purchase. But now on when we get supplies that we don’t need anymore, we post a message to our group chat room, ‘Is there any office needs these supplies?’ to confirm or ‘I’m looking for ○○’ to transfer supplies among business offices. You can attach a photo using LINE WORKS so it is easy to recognize color and size. We are saving at least 10% by eliminating almost no disposal.

Mr. Kunio：

The nursing field is open 24 hours and 365 days. According to the care insurance policy, the number of employees should be arranged according to the area of the facility or the number of tenants and if there is a vacancy, we need to get help from another facility to make up for it. LINE WORKS is very convenient to communicate in an urgent situation like that.

Mr. Kunio：

Nursing field often deals with confidential information like the residents’ personal information. There are things that residents can’t say over the phone because the people around them will be able to hear. Until now, residents have to meet the person in charge face to face in order to figure out what’s going on. After LINE WORKS was introduced, by using personal contact via chat room, it made easier to recognize a situation and instruct orders. ‘Human’ is the core of the nursing business operations so there are human-centered troubles occurred. LINE WORKS improves the precision of communication so it can enable detection and response at an early stage before troubles become more serious.

Mr. Takeshi：

The biggest effect is faster response speed in an emergency situation. A few days ago, we had an infection at one of our offices, and we created a group chatting room to deliver a necessary message to employees who needed to be contacted at once. The one-day response process, such as who would response in the field, preparation of necessary supplies, and checking the nurses’ response, was completed within 10 minutes using LINE WORKS.

Also, the operation of nursing facilities provides the residents an invisible time and space. Nursing staffs have responsibility for supporting residents in a communal life to have a smooth daily routine and for excluding any distraction as soon as possible. In another business perspective, when we have on-day contact related to facility tours or urgent issues from hospital or care managers, it is important to contact rapidly with sales department representatives because it directly related to company’s reliability and sales. With LINE WORKS, employees are able to get in touch and response faster than before.

Mr. Inuta :

I am in charge of overall systems-related works, including fixing the employees’ computers, maintaining and repairing the company servers.

Mr. Noguchi :

I am mainly responsible for rear support from the Sales Headquarters, such as preparation of sales support system and data preparation.

Mr. Noguchi :

We can now send MR staffs the same information on urgent contacts related to medicine and medical supplies simultaneously. We are also feeling that the employees’ message checking rate has also increased when sending the information through SMS. Not long ago, we sent out the information to the employees and checked their checking time. We found out that 80% of those employees read the message within 30 minutes. In the past, it was almost impossible to check whether the employees read the message or not. With LINE WORKS ‘Read’ notification, however, it is much convenient to actually see how many of those employees read the message.

Mr. Inuta :

For those field employees who cannot visit the office often, we believe that it has become more convenient to communicate with others due to LINE WORKS since it enables seamless communication through the tool. For example, once the field employee finds a defect from the product at the customer’s place, the employee can now be able to take the photo of the product and send it to the Product Management department at the headquarters immediately. What changed the most is that it is now possible to make immediate response for the requests from headquarter. The speed of sales activities has definitely changed.

Let’s hear from Mr. Nouta and Ms. Date, who are actually using LINE WORKS.

Mr. Nouta :

We are sharing information such as reactions of the doctors when making business-related contact, introducing our products, or even sharing the trends of the competitor companies through LINE WORKS. Also, when we need certain information, we use LINE WORKS to find the employee who knows about the information.

Ms. Date :

We are mainly using LINE WORKS as a means of delivering the customer contact history or the request to the MR, who is mostly working outside the office. For example, when we receive a contact from our customer asking for more supplies, we notify MR and ask him or her to make response accordingly to the contact.

Mr. Nouta :

Because our conventional means of communication was telephone or company’s computer e-mail, there were only a limited number of people who could communicate with each other. Further, for some employees, they could not reach out to the computer all day. For this reason, we often experienced time difference during information sharing. Today, however, speed of information sharing became much faster than before. Also, because we can find out whether the employees read the message or not through ‘Read’ notification, our overall workflow became much smarter and faster.

By frequently sharing information and the news regarding trends of competitor companies, our company can now place future foreseeing sales activities. As we can freely share information by oneself as well as instantly hear from other employees about their idea and opinion, we can proactively place various activities.

Ms. Date :

Up until today, we felt that SMS communication is more like one-sided communication since we could not find out whether the communication participant has checked the message or not. However, ‘Read’ notification from LINE WORKS helps us a lot, enabling both sender and receiver to find out who read the message. Specifically, younger employees are sending more responses to the massage than the past. As we can communicate with others only using the LINE WORKS stickers, the communication are actively held and this helps us a lot.

In fact, I have never used LINE even for personal purpose. Due to this, when I first heard about the introduction, I felt worrisome and also thought ‘Oh well, I do not know how to use the tool’. After actually using the tool, however, I felt that LINE WORKS was easy-to-use tool. I cannot imagine myself going back to those old days. I would be very much embarrassing if there is no LINE WORKS.

Dr. Taka-aki Nakada :

Chiba University Hospital’s Department of Emergency and Critical Care Medicine serves as the disaster hub hospital of Chiba Prefecture, as well as seriously ill patients within the city. Additionally, it provides immediate response to any events occurred within the institution related to seriously ill patients through a professional team called “MET (Medical Emergency Team).”

Dr. Taka-aki Nakada :

The main reason was our need to share the status before and after a call is made through the doctor assembly request system via chat. We thought of using LINE WORKS to share the latest information with everyone post-call.

Mr. Yamao :

Although the doctor assembly request system had been deemed to be useful, many people were still unaware when emails were sent since they received personal emails in the same inbox. So we came to think, “What if we use LINE WORKS instead of emails?”, which led us to propose a system in which, instead of sending emails, chatroom messages would be sent through LINE WORKS’ bot API and contact even after the call is conducted through the chatroom.

Dr. Shigeto Oda :

I believe that it is innovative. It is incredible how the details, which had previously only been able to be communicated one-on-one by word-of-mouth, could now be shared with everyone at the same time.

There was recently an incident in which about 50 people were injured at the Makuhari Messe convention center. I was on a business trip to a different region for an academic conference, and Chiba’s Fire Department sent me a call for COMET (Chiba Outreach Medical Emergency Team).

Until now, the dispatch of COMET was only determined after identifying a particular situation through a phone call, which was very time-consuming when trying to figure out the current conditions and make the right decisions. This time, however, all pertinent information was shared and exchanged moment by moment through LINE WORKS chat. From details of the conditions shared, we deemed it to be a serious crisis, and thus allowed COMET to be dispatched right away. We could give orders anywhere in the world while continuously checking upon the current situation via LINE WORKS. This allowed us to maintain more situational control. It was remarkable.

Dr. Taka-aki Nakada :

We have been focusing on the research and development of a smart patient data collection, processing and sharing system. So we have coined the Smart119 Project, to achieve fast and accurate emergency medical service through the medical device and system R&D project by Japan’s AMED (Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development) in hopes to realize the future of medical care. We wish to utilize the experiences gained from LINE WORKS to emergency medical sites, to continue to develop an innovative system and accomplish accurate emergency medical care.