A 25% annual increase in reporting volume, enabling greater risk visibility and improved investigation efficiency.
In April 2020, Hitachi began full-scale operation of the system across approximately 800 group companies worldwide. However, implementing it across such a vast organization was not without challenges.
“Many group companies had long operated their own internal reporting channels, and there was some resistance to having information centralized at headquarters. To address this, we carefully explained the benefits of the new system and gained their understanding. We also adopted a phased approach – maintaining local reporting channels for the first six months, then fully integrating them afterward,” said Kojima.
The impact of the implementation was dramatic. From the outset, the number of reports steadily increased at an annual rate of around 25%, reaching approximately 2,000 cases per year as of this writing.
“Perhaps because introducing an external vendor reduced the psychological barrier to reporting, we began receiving reports from the very first day. The increase in reporting does not indicate a rise in misconduct, but rather a ‘sign of improved organizational health,’ as previously hidden voices are now being heard. In fact, we have received critical reports involving significant management risks, which has greatly contributed to misconduct prevention,” said Yamaki.
The ability to enable anonymous two-way communication has also significantly improved the quality of investigations.
“By using the system, reporters can communicate with investigators via chat while maintaining anonymity. It has also become much easier to submit supporting documents, dramatically improving both the speed and accuracy of investigations,” Kojima explained.
Previously, reports from each business unit and group company were manually compiled every six months – a time-consuming process that left the team “barely able to produce summary figures.” This situation changed completely with the use of NAVEX One’s analytics tool, Custom Analytics & Benchmarking, which now enables real-time visibility into reporting trends and has improved the speed of audit responses.
“What used to be difficult – such as extracting a list of reports for a specific organization – can now be completed in just one to two minutes. We can easily filter by region or category, which has been especially well received by audit team members. We are now able to provide precise, up-to-date data to management within minutes, establishing a strong foundation for more advanced governance decision-making,” Yamaki added.
