Ensuring Reliable Quality as Business Infrastructure

Goals and KPIs

2030 Goal

Achieve and maintain reliability and system uptime appropriate for social infrastructure as well as excellent product quality that meets the expectations of many users, including SMEs

2024 Goal

Build organizational infrastructure for high system uptime and excellent quality

2030 KPIs

1. IT service system uptime: 99.5% or higher on an ongoing basis
2. Enhance organizational capacity for product development
1. Build an organization that integrates development and operations
2. Establish a team dedicated to quality assurance and enhance quality in the development process
3. Establish and invest in education and training programs

2024 KPIs

1. Enhance the management system to improve system uptime
2. Establish a cross-sectional organization to improve product quality
3. Evaluate accessibility of in-house products using WCAG as the evaluation standard
4. Formulate accessibility guidelines

Approach and System

Basic Approach to Quality

We support the business of more than 386,000 companies^*1 through our cloud services centered around business chat. As a provider of business infrastructure, we are expected to continuously provide services. At the same time, we are committed to developing and providing IT services that offer the benefits of IT and DX to workers everywhere, including those at small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that may not necessarily be highly IT literate and have not yet introduced or utilized IT and DX before, in order to achieve our mission and vision.

To accomplish this, we conduct activities related to quality in the development and provision of IT services, focusing on "ensuring soundness and availability^*2 appropriate for social infrastructure," "usability (ease of use and satisfaction based on purpose of use)," and "accessibility (lack of barriers for service use)."

Please view the "Advanced Information Security and Privacy Protection" page for details on activities to ensure information security.

*1 As of December 31, 2022
*2 Availability: The ability to keep a system running without stoppage due to failures (equipment or parts failure, disasters, accidents, etc.), or an indicator of such availability.

Quality Management Structure

We have established a system in which the Product Division, which is responsible for developing IT services, leads activities related to quality, headed by the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The Product Design Department within the Product Division also plays a central role in conducting activities to improve usability and accessibility.

Quality Management Structure Chart

Chatwork's Main Initiatives

Quality Improvement in Product Development

Our Product Division is responsible for everything from service development through to post-release incident response. Therefore, we consolidate information related to quality that is provided by customers and other parties in the Product Division and conduct quality-related activities that focus on quickly and reliably connecting this information to new development and post-release service improvements.
We are also committed to daily improvement activities to ensure that customers can use stable services. We use loosely coupled^*1 service infrastructure and employ container technology^*2 to repeat deployments at high speed and in short cycles in order to provide these stable services that aren't easily impacted by change.

*1 Loose coupling: A state in which system components are highly independent from each other, with weak ties, mutual dependencies, and relationships
*2 Container technology: An OS-level virtualization technology that organizes servers to enable efficient application and web development and management

Product Development Flow and Quality Control Process

Initiatives for Continuous Service Provision

We have established our own guidelines to develop and provide sound systems with high availability. We also conduct regular security vulnerability checks through a third-party organization. Moreover, we conduct security audits of critical systems used by our company through a third-party organization to ensure there are no critical issues. We also regularly collect vulnerability information on OS, middleware, and other technology used in our systems and respond quickly and appropriately to these vulnerabilities.

For Chatwork, our core service, we distribute and store user data simultaneously in three contracted Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers. We carry out redundancy* to ensure that the data of our customers is not lost in the unlikely event of a large-scale system failure or major earthquake that causes data loss at a specific data center.

*Redundancy: The process of duplicating computer systems by adding spare systems in preparation for equipment or network failures

Usability and Accessibility Improvement through Expert Reviews

Our Product Design Department plays a central role in conducting expert reviews so that we can develop and provide services that offer the benefits of IT and DX to workers everywhere. These expert reviews evaluate "usability (ease of use and satisfaction based on purpose of use)" and "accessibility (lack of barriers for service use)" in accordance with WCAG guidelines, identify problem areas, and make improvements.

Improvements and Issue Response

We have a system in place whereby the Product Division consolidates and organizes information on issues received from customers through our help desk as well as information on issues identified by related internal departments such as Customer Success, Customer Support, Sales, and Marketing, and takes necessary action to remedy them.

Service Improvement Process Based on Feedback from Customers and Other Parties

We also provide services with a targeted system uptime of 99% or higher as our Service Level Agreement (SLA)^*. In the event of a failure, we have an internal response flow in place to quickly restore service. We also have a system in place to provide refunds to users in the event that uptime falls below the predetermined level.

*Service Level Agreement: A service level agreed to between the service provider and its users regarding the level of service

Response Flow in Case of Failure

Employee Skills and Capability Development

We must develop the skills and capabilities of our employees in order to maintain and improve the quality of the services that we provide. To accomplish this, in addition to new employee training, we support the professional development of our employees through in-house study sessions with external instructors, opportunities for employees to present and share their knowledge, training to improve professional skills, subsidies for the purchase of books and other materials, and other measures.