Keeping up with changing demands through digital and cultural transformation
The Norinchukin Bank is a Japanese private financial institution established by Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA), Japan Fisheries Cooperative (JF), Japan Forest Owners’ Cooperatives (JForest). It serves the agriculture, forestry, and fisheries companies through loans to support their businesses—from food production to processing and distributing to restaurants and local consumption along with food products export.
The bank also supports the retail business of JA Bank and JF Marine Bank by lending funds to agricultural and forestry workers. It is also one of Japan’s largest institutional investors for JA Bank and JF Marine Bank in Japan and abroad.
Throughout the bank’s 100-year heritage, it has adapted more modern systems and processes in response to changing customer and market requirements. Today, it is focused on digital transformation, aiming to improve efficiency, eliminate time-consuming, paper-based tasks, and empower employees to be more productive.
At The Norinchukin Bank, digital transformation (DX) means more than simply adapting how it operates. It’s also a cultural shift that is changing how employees view and use technology.
Flexible integration with other solutions
The bank kicked off its transformation in 2021, introducing groupware to begin digitalizing its business systems. In April 2022, it established a digital transformation (DX) team within the IT & Systems Planning Division.
“We replaced legacy systems with the latest SaaS solutions and set up the digital transformation team to adapt business processes and workstyles to suit this new technology,” explains Masataka Kashiwabara, Head of DX Co-Creation Group, IT & Systems Planning Division, DX Co-Creation Group at The Norinchukin Bank.
The first workflow that the digital transformation (DX) team redesigned was called the general-purpose workflow. It handled internal approvals and various applications. The previous approach required users to enter the same information into multiple systems throughout the approval process. If users enter incorrect information in a system, they also had to modify the information in other systems.
Every step of this process required manual input from staff, which was a major productivity drain for the bank. To speed it up, the digital transformation (DX) team decided to build an end-to-end system that connected siloed systems and automated manual workflow steps—handling everything from the initial request to approval. The team also wanted to integrate cloud storage to keep all the relevant documents together in one place.
“We needed a solution we could connect to cloud storage and groupware,” Kashiwabara explains. “ServiceNow gave us that flexibility.”
Combining reusable components speeds up app development
The digital transformation (DX) team implemented ServiceNow App Engine, using out-of-the-box components to create templates with reusable functionality for cost-effective, safe, and scalable future development of business applications.
“Templates can be reused or combined to build new applications quickly and easily,” explains Yuji Hamba, Director and Managing Executive Officer, Member of the Board of Directors, Chief Information & Digital Officer at The Norinchukin Bank. “App Engine gives us a flexible foundation to develop new apps and keep up with changing demands in the digitization of business operations. These applications are easy to use because they’re built with standard low-code components that everyone is familiar with.”
One of the first low-code applications the bank built was the revamped general-purpose workflow, which is a large application made from a number of different modules.
“Our hard work paid off and we now have a comprehensive library of templates,” says Kashiwabara. “It will give us the speed and flexibility to release applications faster in the future while increasing developer productivity.”
Promoting user adoption by simplifying complex processes
Employees are often reluctant to adopt new technologies, so prior to building the new general-purpose workflow, the bank conducted a thorough review of its application requests approval process to make sure it would eliminate manual and repetitive tasks and provided end-to-end automation across all functional units.
“Our goal was to give users a better experience by simplifying a complex process and saving them time,” explains Hamba. “Previously, documents had to go through several departments to get approval. Rather than building a digital workflow that replicates a time-consuming process, we redesigned it around the needs of our employees.”
Streamlining requests with status updates at every stage
The general-purpose workflow went live in August 2023, and the bank collected feedback from approximately 6,000 users across the business group. “The process is much simpler, so approvals are faster now,” said one, while another commented: “Approval requests are sent straight to the person in charge via chat, which saves time. That’s really helpful when we need a fast decision.”
The revamp of the general-purpose workflow, which was intended to reduce employee frustration, has certainly drawn appreciation.
The new low-code applications building workflow includes a menu item called ‘Send Direction’, which employees can use to submit requests for certain business tasks to be processed. This automates a task that was previously requested by phone or email.
“We’ve got at-a-glance visibility of the status of each request and who each task is assigned to,” says Kashiwabara. “This helped to eliminate mistakes and make the process accurate, which has been well received by employees.”
Faster development and reduced implementation costs
Replacing the previous workflow with ServiceNow doesn’t just deliver extraordinary IT experiences across any system. It also reduces integration costs and internal maintenance requirements for legacy systems, which is an operational cost saving. “SaaS is much less expensive to run, and our implementation cost was only about 70% of what it would have cost to update the legacy general-purpose workflow,” adds Kashiwabara.
The speed of development was also faster than expected. The team anticipated it would take 18 months to update the legacy workflow, but it took just eight months from conception to go live with ServiceNow.
In the future, The Norinchukin Bank plans to expand the use of ServiceNow. As Hamba explains, “As well as using ServiceNow to support employee services, HR, facilities, and applications, we plan to use the ServiceNow Platform alongside business process reengineering (BPR). This will help to automate the routine tasks that are a burden on staff. We’d also like to roll out more business applications and to use ServiceNow for customer service.”
As for the cultural shift that the bank set out to achieve, the revamped general- purpose workflow has sparked greater awareness and the desire to utilize digital solutions among employees.
“We will continue promoting our company-wide transformation as we build more business applications by simply leveraging our App Engine components and templates,” confirms Hamba.