Visualizing operational state and improving and efficiency through the PDCA cycle.
Left: Mr. Shunsuke Note, Development Group, System Planning Department, Lifenet Insurance Company.
Right: Mr. Junpei Yokozawa, Senior Executive Officer, is in charge of Lifenet’s IT Strategy Department, System Planning Department, System Operation Department and Data Science Promotion Office.
Lifenet Insurance, whose manifesto is "honest, easy to understand, cheap and convenient," strives to overturn the traditional life insurance model as an internet-only life insurance company. Known from their TV commercials, they aim to provide simple and affordable life insurance that lets customers choose the most suitable insurance products by themselves.
"Sixteen years have passed since our establishment, but we continue to maintain a venture mindset and seek to undertake advanced initiatives ahead of other companies,” says Mr. Junpei Yokozawa, Senior Executive Officer overseeing external/internal IT systems.
Lifenet’s system department is responsible for internal IT services. The department oversees IT service requests from employees, IT-related inquiries and incidents.
Prior to choosing Ivanti, Lifenet used individual tools for each request and inquiry, which "didn't result in an efficient system," Mr. Yokozawa recalls. Requests were sent from various "windows" such as approval workflows, web forms, emails and chats. System department staff manually registered these in the service management tool, depending on the window.
When joining Lifenet, "I felt it was unclear from a user's (employee's) perspective which tool to use for which request," recalls Mr. Shunsuke Note of the system department.
Despite advocating "honesty, clarity, affordability and convenience" as its manifesto, Lifenet’s focus on speed in system development since its establishment evolved into a distorted and complex internal IT service management system that inconvenienced users.
Mr. Yokozawa also points out that there were even larger issues from a management perspective.
"We wanted to enhance our internal IT controls, but the challenge was that the state of IT services was not visible. While business operations seemed to be running smoothly, the user departments were dissatisfied. On the other hand, the IT team believed they were doing their best with the resources they had. Because the current state was not visible, it was unclear whether the status quo was acceptable or not, or whether improvements were possible.”
To address these challenges, Lifenet Insurance started a project to improve internal IT service management around summer 2022. They decided to update their ITSM tools, began selecting products and conducting Proof of Concept (PoC). Numerous ITSM tools were considered, and PoC was conducted with four products.
Selection criteria focused on being able to centralize not only IT service requests but also inquiries and incident information, customizable to fit existing input forms and capable of user authentication with the existing single sign-on system.
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM was ultimately chosen for meeting those requirements while being “clear and convenient” for users.
"When we tried it in the PoC, the first thing we noticed was that the portal screen provided to users was intuitively easy to understand and use,” Mr. Note explains. “Its high customizability, including workflows, was also attractive."
Furthermore, Lifenet Insurance has a policy of prioritizing cloud tools and SaaS for newly introduced IT tools to minimize the operational burden on engineers. Ivanti Neurons met these criteria as well.
In April 2023, Lifenet began gradually transitioning IT service requests, inquiries to the IT department and incident handling to Ivanti Neurons. Live operations commenced that August. The four-month implementation period was possible because Ivanti Neurons is a SaaS tool.
Following implementation of Ivanti Neurons, a survey of employees revealed that they found it easier to understand where to submit requests.
From a management perspective, the previously necessary enhancement of IT controls has also seen progress. The operational status of IT services is now accumulated as data and visualized on dashboards, preparing the groundwork for improvement through the PDCA cycle.
"It has become possible to quantify and easily understand at a glance the current state, such as the number of different types of requests per month or year and the time required to address incidents,” Mr. Yokozawa says. “Moving forward, we plan to report such data to the management, set improvement targets and execute the PDCA cycle."
Additionally, by centralizing IT service operations with Ivanti Neurons, Mr. Yokozawa expects it will also become easier to generate improvement ideas within the IT department. "For instance, discussions like, 'This step in the workflow is time-consuming, so let's improve that,' can be had more easily.”
Moreover, using Ivanti Neurons for help desk operations will allow the accumulation of knowledge, potentially enabling internal publication of an FAQ. Currently, the company provides a Large Language Model generative AI-based system for internal use. Linking this system with the accumulated knowledge could further enhance convenience.
Lifenet is also considering using Ivanti Neurons to manage its IT assets.
"If all information is consolidated on the Ivanti Neurons platform, we believe we can further enhance the efficiency of IT service request and incident management operations by linking them with IT asset information," Mr. Yokozawa concludes.
Note: A customer’s results are specific to its total environment/experience, of which Ivanti is a part. Individual results may vary based on each customer’s unique environment.