Overview
A subsidiary of NEC, NEC Networks & Systems Integration Corporation (NESIC) offers one-stop Information Communication Technology (ICT) services, from planning/consulting to design, system introduction, maintenance/administration and outsourcing.
NESIC also provides maintenance, operations, and around-the-clock monitoring services every day of the year at maintenance and service centers throughout Japan.
The Symphonict cloud partner network includes:
- Slack, Zoom: online messaging and meetings
- Wrike: project management
- DocuSign: electronic signature and agreement
- Box: digital file sharing and collaboration
- Workato: digital location management and attendance
- Slido: online questionnaire tool
- Kloudspot: situational awareness and intelligence
With nearly 8,000 employees (consolidated) and net sales exceeding $3B annually, NESIC specializes in delivering ICT solutions for enterprise networks and smart offices, infrastructure, such as oil, rail and disaster prevention, and carrier networks worldwide.
In October 2019, NESIC began an initiative to deploy its own workstyle innovation solutions for itself. Anticipating the influx of visitors to Tokyo for the 2020 Olympic Games, NESIC was asked to restructure its area offices in order to reduce the impact of employees commuting into the area each day. The challenge: enable a distributed and remote workstyle.
From an olympic to a pandemic imperative
NESIC was charged with reducing the space of its headquarters by 60%. The organization opened seven satellite offices and restructured to accommodate its head office, innovation base and training/R&D across multiple sites. And, to bring these locations together in concert, NESIC developed a multi-SaaS strategy to support its distributed environments.
Dubbed Symphonict (symphony + ICT), NESIC integrated multiple cutting-edge cloud technologies over a network platform to enable integrated, unified management and analysis of data.
“Like many other businesses, ours is changing dramatically, very quickly,” says Osamu Kikuchi, NESIC’s Head Of Business Development. “We need – and our customers need – a best-of-breed environment to keep up.”
By March 2020, the NESIC’s digital transformation initiative was on track and rolling out well ahead of the Olympics. Then, the world turned upside down due to COVID-19. Organizations were forced to immediately embrace and adjust to the world of remote work. NESIC was not only prepared, it was able to migrate to a fully distributed workstyle seamlessly.
Leveraging Symphonict, NESIC enabled connected on- and off-premise work – and it had a built-in system for helping to assure health and safety as it slowly began to re-open in the following months. Kloudspot’s Situational Awareness and Intelligence Platform acted as the key, bringing together data from NESIC’s spaces and enabling the company to create real-time heatmaps of people in the office, locate individuals, enable contact tracing, and help maintain social distancing.
For NESIC’s Osamu Kikuchi, the value of Symphonict and Kloudspot’s Platform became instantly apparent and advantageous – for NESIC customers who are considering Symphonict for their own organizations. He says, “prior to COVID-19, situational awareness was hard to explain and to communicate ROI. But in a world with Coronavirus, customers see how you protect employee health in the office. It’s very easy to understand now.”
Like many, Kikuchi believes that the paradigm for on-premise versus remote work has permanently changed at NESIC. “We need to work at home, but fifty percent of our workforce will still be in office after COVID. We will have a new workstyle globally. A best-of-breed environment with multiple cloud services, like Symphonict, is mandatory.”
Kloudspot’s Platform has helped create an Intelligent Space for NESIC. By bringing together its Wi-Fi, camera and sensor data – along with the business applications in the Symphonict cloud – real-time insights and actions that enhance productivity and help assure health and safety are enabled.
NESIC’s Kikuchi explains, “Kloudspot’s location-based data analytics can reach into an organization’s Wi-Fi, camera and sensor data to monitor everything from people density and air quality to humidity and CO2. Kloudspot can collect and handle all of this data, analyze it, find the insights and automatically trigger responses for what to do next, in business or in life.”
With Kloudspot and Symphonict, organizations can:
- Visualize who is where on premises, viewing the floor situation intuitively with a heatmap. So you can see the degree of congestion and vacant seat area and help maintain social distancing or occupancy limits.
- Send alerts by Slack or email under certain conditions. For example, an alert can be sent when the number of people exceeds the stated number permitted in a meeting room.
- Detect whether people are wearing specified clothing or PPE at entry, such as masks, helmets, protective vests, goggles or safety shoes – and send a reminder, or prohibit entry if specifications are not met.
- Locate employees in real time. For example, an employee could send a note to a location bot in Slack asking where their manager is.
- Understand behavior history and contact trace, if required. For example, inform or extract people who are suspected of having close contact with someone who was infected, as well as identify the areas where an infected person stayed and determine the area to be disinfected.
- All the while protect employee privacy with settings customized to the organization’s unique requirements.
