Mitsubishi Electric boosts connection among employees, speeds digital business transformation with Microsoft Teams

Transformation of the global communications environment begins

When it was founded in 1921, Mitsubishi Electric was already thinking 100 years ahead. An integrated manufacturer with operations that extend from industry and factory automation to utilities, energy, transportation, and IT solutions, the company has diversified its global business into 12 areas. Operating roughly 300 locations in 41 countries and regions, it has developed into a mammoth corporate group that employs about 150,000 people.

The Mitsubishi Electric Group is now looking toward its next 100 years. In line with its “Changes for the Better” motto, the company has embarked on two types of digital transformation (DX) to change its business model and business style. In April 2020, Mitsubishi Electric launched the Business Innovation Division, under the direct control of its president, with the goal of accelerating the transformation of its business model. This launch brought together capabilities inside and outside the company to create new business through open innovation.

The company had begun transforming its business style in 2016 by creating the Mitsubishi Electric Global IT Platform Service to serve as an integrated information-sharing platform for about 150,000 people within the group. “Our chief aim in building the platform was to make communication and information sharing more efficient for our 300 locations around the globe,” says Keisuke Goto, Systems Platform Department Manager, Corporate IT Strategy Division at Mitsubishi Electric. “The information-sharing environment we had before was inefficient because divisions and locations ran different systems. Every time a person transferred locations, they had to learn new email software and port their email data. These tasks wasted a lot of work hours and frustrated employees, and eliminating that dissatisfaction was one of our primary goals.”

To overcome this frustrating inefficiency, Mitsubishi Electric planned to unify the entire group in a single communication and collaboration environment for email, file sharing, and more. The company decided to embrace a public cloud service to gain high scalability and help ensure a smooth global rollout. Mitsubishi Electric chose Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure because the support systems are always available, which improves communication efficiency and increases availability.

This project was especially noteworthy for two reasons: the headquarters in Japan led the entire project, and the project was introduced and rolled out to 41 countries and regions nearly simultaneously in 2017. Many companies would have first installed the system in the parent organization and then moved on to domestic affiliates, followed in stages by global regions such as China or the rest of Asia. “Mitsubishi Electric has long put more emphasis on business units than on countries or regions,” says Goto, noting how surprising other companies found Mitsubishi Electric’s approach. “It was natural for us to achieve this global rollout by taking advantage of coordination and collaboration among business units, centered on Japan, to construct the system. While the task was by no means easy, we successfully accomplished the rollout by creating a framework that involved ongoing discussions among all of our business units.”

The Mitsubishi Electric Global IT Platform Service has since evolved, implementing operational rules that comply with regulatory systems in different countries—most importantly, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect in 2018. “We haven’t reached some locations yet, but SharePoint, which we now use for file sharing, is available to about 130,000 employees, so that’s a fairly high degree of coverage,” says Goto. “Cloud services from Microsoft are compliant with the regulatory systems of many countries throughout the world, but putting the operational rules in place isn’t a simple matter. We continue to make changes to optimize operations while complying with various regulatory systems.”

The company deployed Microsoft Teams across the group in April 2020. Having made dramatic changes in its information-sharing environment, “There’s no going back on DX for Mitsubishi Electric,” says Goto. “Employees really welcome the arrival of more convenient tools.”

COVID-19 accelerates the final stage of its business style transformation

Mitsubishi Electric streamlined its communications inside and outside of the group by skillfully deploying Microsoft 365 services for email and document sharing. Additionally, the company adopted Yammer for open information sharing and Skype for Business Online for chat and videoconferencing. Microsoft Teams was later adopted as the successor to Skype for Business Online.

One might imagine resistance to switching away from a familiar tool, but Goto recounts a different experience with Teams. “The quality of communications on Teams was better than on Skype for Business Online, and it was markedly easier to use as a communication tool,” he says. “As a result, Teams played an important role in allowing DX to drive the business style transformation. Many younger employees were eager advocates of Teams, which brought a certain lively energy to the promotion of Teams.”

“I initially heard that the tool was simply a successor to Skype for Business, but that turned out to be completely wrong,” says Shutaro Shimizu, a project member in the Global IT Platform Promotion Group, Systems Platform Department, Corporate IT Strategy Division at Mitsubishi Electric. “I realized we could use Teams to facilitate cooperation within a project—which the Business Department had been looking for at the Kobe location—and read over a chat from a team meeting after the fact and provide joint editing on shared documents within a thread.”

Adds Shingo Kamata, a project member in the Systems Group, Systems Platform Department at Mitsubishi Electric, “In system development, you often don’t feel a sense of accomplishment at each milestone that you achieve along the way. For that reason, we employed an agile development technique called ‘scrum.’ Shimizu, I, and four colleagues from within the department created things like guidelines for using communication tools correctly, a manual that summarized issues specific to us, and a plan to evaluate in-house deployment of new functions. This raised our output, and we were able to proceed with the project while keeping our motivation high.”

Shimizu wanted to grow the number of people involved beyond the six-member scrum team. He used Yammer to create a Teams user community and enlist early adopters as “ambassadors.” Those ambassadors served as liaisons who could talk with employees about their concerns with the system. The community grew to about 1,000 members, and it solicited valuable opinions, not just from IT specialists, but from people who envisioned using Teams in many different ways.

In 2020, the world unexpectedly faced COVID-19. The six-member scrum team had to respond in many ways, including quickly creating a website for centralized information about working remotely. After the Japanese government declared a state of emergency in April, the website became a core DX tool promoting business style transformation. It enabled as many as 100,000 employees to fully embrace remote work in Teams within the space of a year without any major challenges.

A structure organized around goals, not a business unit hierarchy

The initial key performance indicator that the Corporate IT Strategy Division’s Systems Platform Department set after it got Teams fully operational was to hit 100,000 users. According to Goto, that goal was achieved so quickly that a new target was set: to flip the ratio of emails sent versus Teams posts to 4:6.

“By April, about 18,000 people were using Teams,” says Goto. “After shelter-in-place restrictions were adopted worldwide in response to COVID-19, the number of Teams users shot up sixfold to more than 100,000. We set new numerical targets to shift the center of gravity from one-way communications by email to bidirectional communications within teams or projects. One thing we did to achieve this goal was to use the Microsoft Power BI data analysis tool to let us visualize and publicize usage. That worked, and we moved steadily closer to our target.”

Kamata says that Teams use is steadily becoming more central within the global expanse of the Mitsubishi Electric Group. “Our concept for communications was ‘easy, speedy, and flat.’ By ‘easy and speedy,’ I mean 90 percent of the 100,000 users are always active, and even employees who are inexperienced with IT can use it for daily meetings without encountering resistance from the get-go. The ‘flat’ part took more work to achieve. The Systems Platform Department—60 or so employees—had Goto create a ’Manager channel.’ Every week Goto would send out whatever messages he wanted, which could include private matters. This helped bring the department closer together.”

Kamata adds that user surveys have brought a lot of very satisfied responses. “In January 2020, we sent out a lengthy questionnaire about Teams before the full rollout, and we received approximately 3,000 responses. One noteworthy comment said that the company was changing from a vertical, business unit–centric hierarchy to a laterally connected structure that was defined by goals. Because that was the ideal we were shooting for, we found it very motivating that employees could sense that.”

Continues Kamata, “Another response that made us happy was that the usual approach to tools used to be to use them within the bounds described by manuals, but that awareness was now growing that they could be used flexibly. This was especially true among the ambassadors, with tools like Teams that added improvements and functionality on a very rapid cycle. Employees are changing from a passive to an active stance in using IT, which will have a major impact on the success or failure of DX.”

New ways of working for a new normal

Mitsubishi Electric hasn’t reached the end of its sought-after business model and business style transformation, nor is the DX that supports it finished. “Work styles are moving forward step by step, in keeping with a new normal,” says Goto. Since March 2018, Mitsubishi Electric has been promoting changes in the way people work by handing out tablets to all employees, which they bring on business trips and use to conduct paperless meetings at their offices. The company began using Surface Pro 7+ in April 2020 as a second-generation standard device, which it’s now distributing to domestic affiliates. “The rollout to affiliates has made great strides since the pandemic began,” says Goto. “The goal is a new business style that’s tailored to the new normal and isn’t tied to places, which eliminates the need for paper, name stamps, and signatures.”

Shimizu adds, “By broadening the range of technology that we use, we’re promoting a DX that reaches not only users who mainly work in offices, but also users who work at customer sites or are active on production floors. For example, employees can use HoloLens to interact in a mixed reality environment. By projecting digital information within a HoloLens user’s field of vision and collaborating from remote locations, we’re able to deploy development and design expertise on the frontlines. Similarly, by using the Shifts app in Teams, we make time management and communication for teams more efficient.”

Concludes Goto, "By using Teams more extensively, we hope to overcome a number of different barriers. Microsoft Teams has other functions we have yet to release. Our investigations into what sort of guidelines to establish and how specific the rules we define should be are ongoing, but we’re laying the groundwork to use features that invite guests from outside the company into Teams and live event functionality. We hope to work with HR and administration so that we can expand the circle of new work styles throughout the group.” 

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