SCSK Corp. Acts on Data to Overcome Work-Life Balance Challenges

Healthy employees lead to a healthy organization of growth and innovation.

That’s why SCSK Corporation, a Japanese IT service provider, strives to protect its employees from overwork. Recognizing a persistent overtime problem among its employees, SCSK aims to keep monthly overtime below 20 hours and promote 100% usage of paid annual leave. Not only does this improve employee health and satisfaction, it also fuels a culture of workplace innovation and drives profitable growth. As a result, SCSK has become an award-winning pioneer in work-style reform in Japan.

Yet after the switch to remote work, SCSK found it difficult to track hours worked with only virtual private network (VPN) access logs because of the ever-growing volume of data. The self-reported attendance data of employees was also sometimes inaccurate or incomplete, and managing attendance with Excel was too inflexible and inefficient to accommodate the distributed workforce. SCSK turned to Splunk for the solution.

Automated Data Analytics Eliminates Hurdles

“Minimizing long working hours is our top priority,” says Hiroko Kunimatsu, head of the IT engineering division of the platform solution business department at SCSK. “We needed a tool that extracts every employee’s telework duration from massive amounts of VPN access logs, then cross-references it with the data self-reported by the employee in the attendance management system and presents any discrepancies in an intuitive way.”

The Splunk platform stood out among the many options because it automatically extracts the essential information from the massive amount of datasets coming in diverse forms, including those from heterogeneous in-house applications. It then analyzes the data and quickly displays results in a convenient way. SCSK was also impressed by how easy Splunk was to implement — the platform was up and running in only two to three months.

In the past, SCSK had to link the attendance system with employee ID cards to check clock-in and clock-out times, and there were concerns about inaccuracies caused by discrepancies between VPN access log data and employee-entered attendance information. “Splunk removes the hurdles in managing remote workers’ attendance and significantly streamlines our remote access operations,” Kunimatsu says. With the Splunk platform, everything becomes automated and SCSK is able to use data to support work style reform.

Work-Life Balance at One Glance

No longer buried in Excel files, SCSK now has full visibility into the attendance and work hours of its remote workers on Splunk’s dashboard, which makes it easy to visualize and analyze data.

With Splunk, SCSK can also easily spot inconsistencies between the VPN access log data and what employees record in the attendance management system at both the individual and departmental levels. Any attendance data can be retrieved at any time, without waiting for month-end reports — none of which was possible before Splunk came into the picture.

Thanks to the granular insights gained through Splunk, SCSK can now discourage employees from logging in or checking email when they are technically off the clock. This improves labor management by disciplining “workaholics” and encouraging a healthy work-life balance across the workforce. SCSK can now foster an environment where employees get their work done during working hours while also keeping employees aware of and compliant with company policies on remote work.

Keeping Pace With Evolving Needs

With Splunk, SCSK successfully reshaped the way it operates and manages its workforce and looks forward to deriving more value from its data with the Splunk platform. For example, encouraged by Japan’s recent work style reform laws, SCSK plans to set up a work-interval system that ensures employees rest for a minimum number of hours between the end of one work day and the beginning of the next.

With a persistent need for remote work and compliance with recent laws, SCSK’s need for work status analysis and visualization will only increase, and Splunk will continue to be an indispensable tool. Especially during proof of concept, SCSK will have to predict employee overtime based on historical data and verify the concept with actual data. The more data accumulated, the more accurate the predictions and verifications will be.

“Because of Splunk, I’m confident that we will be able to tackle every new challenge as we continue to enact work style reform,” Kunimatsu says.