JBS Contributes to Improving Sustainable Management for Companies Through Development of “Nikkei Sustainable Link”

Japan Business Systems, Inc. (Headquarters: Minato Ward, Tokyo; President: Yukihiro Makita; hereinafter, “JBS” securities code: 5036) has developed a system for Nikkei Sustainable Link, a new service jointly developed by Nikkei Inc. and Nikkei Research Inc. , a research company within the Nikkei Group. Nikkei Sustainable Link is the core initiative of the Nikkei Sustainable Link Project implemented by the Nikkei Group to raise awareness about the importance of sustainable supply chains around the world, and functions as an evaluation and analysis platform for visualizing the sustainability of supply chains. As the system uses a common questionnaire to conduct surveys, analyses, and evaluations, once a company has answered the questionnaire, the results are made available to all survey requesting companies.
This ultimately contributes to reducing the burden on both the requesting and responding companies, as the survey requesting companies do not need to create individual questionnaires, and the responding companies do not need to answer similar but different questionnaires multiple times for each survey requesting company. In this project, JBS worked together with the Nikkei Group on the entire process from system requirements definition to development, construction, operation and maintenance, using Microsoft Azure as the system platform to achieve from-scratch development in a short time frame.

In its previous survey activities, Nikkei Research used systems that support corporate surveys, such as web surveys and mechanisms for exchanging Excel files, but it had issues providing services such as dashboards that can provide feedback on survey results and evaluation results to individual companies. In light of these needs, it reached out to JBS for support as a partner capable of working on the entire process from system planning through to development and maintenance.

JBS was selected because we have a comprehensive support system that covers everything from requirements definition to the most upstream stages of a project through to operation and maintenance. Key considerations were that JBS is a partner capable of working together on the creation of a platform that would address the issues mentioned above, demonstrating leadership to turn highly abstract requirements into concrete system specifications and possessing operational know-how that takes back-end infrastructure into consideration.
JBS also determined that from scratch development would be the best way to meet Nikkei Research’s requests, and the proposal for system development that could be implemented in a short period of time using Microsoft Azure was also well received.

With a wealth of experience building systems for the Nikkei Group and other companies, as well as knowledge in the use of Microsoft Azure, JBS was able to propose and build a system that was feasible in a short period of time, even though it was a from-scratch build.

JBS will continue to embody its mission of “Bringing the best technology to everyone, everywhere” and contribute to the expansion of our customers’ businesses.

Using a common questionnaire provided by Nikkei Research, we survey, analyze, and evaluate supply chains on behalf of the requesting company. For the requesting company, all operations from announcing the survey to conducting it and disclosing the evaluation results can be completed within one system, and for the responding company, it can handle multiple surveys with a single response. This reduces the workload of both the requesting company and the responding company, realizing an efficient survey and evaluation process. The UI/UX has been designed to be easy to use for both the requesting company and the responding company and feedback on the evaluation results can be provided quickly.

Nikkei Sustainable Link Project | Expanding the Circle of Sustainability and Co-creating the Next Society (Japanese)