The Challenge
Difficulties in understanding complex processes led to delays and support tickets
As a global electronic solution provider based in Japan, NEC Corporation (NEC) is executing the objectives of its medium-term management plan for 2025 with the aim of achieving its corporate purpose: “Orchestrating a brighter world: NEC creates the social values of safety, security, fairness and efficiency to promote a more sustainable world where everyone has the chance to reach their full potential.” The corporate transformation and management plan includes three core objectives: digital transformation within the company, digital transformation of customers, and a flagship project aimed at the digital transformation of society.
To fuel its own digital transformation, NEC focuses on: embracing diverse employee digital work styles to enhance job satisfaction and enable employees to reach their full potential; the digital transformation of core businesses to optimize processes and promote data-driven management; and the digital transformation of business operations to achieve highly efficient, advanced IT operations. Each transformation effort encompasses three key strategies: refining the digital employee experience, using a data platform that integrates various corporate analytics and enables NEC to leverage them effectively, and modernizing, streamlining, and enhancing all of the systems within the organization. The primary objective of these strategies is to unlock the full potential of employees with advanced digital experiences, providing employees with an environment that enables them to perform at their best and most productive.
“Experience is a pivotal factor when embarking on the task of modernizing over 1,000 systems across the NEC Group, with the aim of rendering them user-friendly. We can never truly improve our experience through modernization or manual preparation alone, despite our efforts to promote digital transformation after the implementation of various advanced systems,” Noriaki Seki, Executive Professional of Architecture, Director, Corporate, DX Strategy Office at NEC emphasized.
NEC invested in new technologies, including SAP Ariba and Salesforce – but was spending several months preparing user training manuals, which were time-intensive to create, underutilized, and failed to reduce the number of user help requests. For example, employees struggled to understand common business processes and workflows in SAP Ariba. As a result, many employees’ requests were returned with feedback such as “required items are left unchecked,” “required files are not attached,” or “file attached in the wrong location.” Approximately 10% of employee requests had to be passed on to support staff, and 20% of these submissions were returned to employees to supply further information or fix errors. This created frustration for both system administrators and front-line system users.
NEC began exploring solutions that would improve the user experience, enabling them to use the system without manuals or additional training, while using standard system functions without modifying the applications themselves.
With these underlying digital transformation strategies and needs in place, NEC began considering the implementation of a digital adoption platform.
The Solution
In-app guidance eliminates need for training manuals and automated processes prevent employee errors
NEC’s search for a solution led the company to WalkMe. WalkMe provides the company with solutions to easily implement navigation, guidance, and automation without modifying SAP Ariba or Salesforce directly. Through a two-month PoC process, NEC evaluated WalkMe across several factors and, based on their results, selected it as one of their digital adoption platforms.
The decisive factors in the adoption of WalkMe as a solution were WalkMe’s rich set of capabilities that meet NEC’s needs, WalkMe’s ability to meet NEC’s strict security requirements, and WalkMe’s ability to support NEC in solution design and responsiveness to technical inquiries.
“We have a pretty strict set of security rules, and we can only use cloud services that have passed a security audit. WalkMe was always quick to respond to our security team who conducted the audit, and this experience strengthened our confidence and trust in WalkMe as a partner,” said Seki.
As they developed their digital adoption strategy, the NEC team analyzed support inquiries for various processes within SAP Ariba and Salesforce to identify trends and specific bottleneck points. This, combined with input from end users and business owners about how employees should use the systems, provided a starting point for building their WalkMe solutions.
Yudai Uraguchi, Assistant Manager, Management Information System Department, Corporate IT and Digital Division at NEC said, “We took the initiative in building the system, while WalkMe’s team reviewed what we had built and gave us useful feedback and comments on the user experience based on their expertise. We are also grateful for WalkMe’s technical support in helping us create stable, successful solutions.”
Now, WalkMe guides users with instructions and alerts that pop up at where input is required, while the masking feature (invisible Launchers) blocks specific actions to prevent users from making operational errors. In addition, NEC has built WalkMe solutions that automatically check if users have completed all the required fields or attached relevant files before they submit requests, which not only provides users with a better experience, it also ensures submissions are accurate and smoothly processed the first time to reduce completion time.
Uraguchi said, “WalkMe allows us to implement customized guidance for users, so we can offer the enhanced employee experience that we want. In particular, the auto-execution feature that assists users as they complete processes is one of the most valuable features of WalkMe.”
The Benefit
Reduced support tickets, improved data accuracy, and a better employee experience
Since implementing WalkMe, the company has seen numerous qualitative and quantitative benefits. A comparison of the SAP Ariba submission process before and after implementing WalkMe guidance shows a 75% reduction in the number of employee support tickets, which not only saves employees time, it significantly decreases support teams’ burden of responding to inquiries. Furthermore, for one common SAP Ariba process, the number of user submissions sent back due to errors or lack of information was reduced by approximately 70%. For Salesforce, NEC reports that users’ time spent inputting data was reduced by about 20%, which frees teams to focus on higher-value work.
In addition to these results, which highlight how much time and energy was spent trying to navigate tasks and systems that confused users, user surveys also show a high level of user satisfaction. For example, recent user feedback included the following: “The pop-up guides and the automatic data input check feature are very helpful, “I don’t get submissions returned anymore” and “I don’t have to call support to help me use the system anymore.” Some also commented: “We should have chosen WalkMe when we launched the system.”
Uraguchi also said: “We can now easily bring onboard new employees without having to prepare manuals and conduct training, as they can just intuitively use our systems.”
As for the possibility of expanding WalkMe to other systems in the future, Seki explained, “We aren’t implementing WalkMe on all of our more than 1,000 systems. Instead, we’re taking a strategic approach and targeting specific systems where WalkMe can work effectively and eliminate operational bottlenecks that users may face. If a system’s log data shows operational problems to be improved, we will conduct task analysis and evaluate if we can solve such issues using WalkMe. But if the bottleneck lies in a large set of operational process patterns, then we need to improve the operational process itself.”
With WalkMe, NEC accelerates the enhanced employee experience and business processes central to its corporate-wide digitization strategy – and going forward, this global IT leader will continue to expand and maximize the value created by its organization-wide digital transformation.