Thirty-two years from the site shed to the operations chair

Mandate

Complete the coaxial retirement, stabilise a contractor workforce that was ageing and shrinking, consolidate community channel operations and bring the contact centres into one operating rhythm with the field.

Outcomes

• Moved 18 core contractor firms to three-year retainers; technicians under 35 rose from 9% to 17% and average time to repair fell from 31 to 19 hours.
• Consolidated seven community-channel master control rooms into one, cutting the replacement bill from ¥2.6bn to ¥1.1bn and annual cost by ¥290m while keeping every local reporter.
• Introduced a sixty-minute public notice rule after the February 2024 provisioning outage; restoration has since fallen inside the first published range in 83% of qualifying incidents.
• Raised fibre coverage from 52% to 81% of the 612,000 homes passed.
• Restored 41,000 households affected by the late-August 2024 typhoon within six days.

Decisions in context

I became chief operating officer when the coaxial retirement was half complete and the contractor base was visibly thinning. My remit brought together functions that had reported separately: network operations, field operations, the contact centres in Kumamoto and Kagoshima, community channel operations and the purchase of field services. I spent the first year making them work to one rhythm, so that a fault seen in the operations centre, a call to a contact centre and a work order to a contractor described the same event in the same words. I then led the master control consolidation, the move of our core contractors to retainers and the changes to outage communication after the February 2024 provisioning fault. Since June 2023 I have also been an inside director, which has changed how I write for the board: I now sign what I present and vote on it. The work that remains is the final 116,000 homes of the coaxial retirement, many of them in hill and island areas.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; completing the coaxial retirement programme by March 2029.

Mandate

Recommend how to replace an ageing coaxial network, then deliver the approved programme without losing the customers who depended on the old one.

Outcomes

• Won board approval in 2017 for a ¥58bn node-by-node migration completing by March 2029, against a ¥41bn demand-led alternative.
• Migrated 142 of 291 node areas by May 2021, raising fibre coverage from 9% to 52% of homes passed.
• Reduced fault tickets in migrated areas from 14.2 to 5.6 per thousand customers a month.
• Cut the second-visit rate from 9% in the first eleven node areas to 2.4% by surveying in-home wiring before each appointment.

Decisions in context

The merger had left Hanagiri with seven cable networks of different ages, much of the coaxial plant built in the 1990s and nearing the end of its working life. I was asked to recommend how to replace it and then to deliver whatever the board chose. My 2017 board paper set out two options: a demand-led programme in which customers moved to fibre when they chose to pay for it, and a node-by-node programme in which we moved whole neighbourhoods at our cost and switched off the coaxial plant behind them. I recommended the second, which was more expensive and unpopular with our sales division. The rest of the role was delivery: wiring surveys, appointments for households that had asked for nothing, briefings with neighbourhood associations, set-top box exchanges and the retirement of amplifiers and power supplies. By May 2021, 142 of our 291 node areas had been migrated.

Reason for the move

Appointed chief operating officer, bringing network, field, contact-centre and community channel operations under one remit.

Mandate

Turn seven stations' operations rooms, fault processes and contractor lists into one network operation.

Outcomes

• Merged seven operations rooms into a single network operations centre in Kumamoto in 2015.
• Reduced 61 contractor firms to 52 under common work-order and safety standards.
• Led restoration after the April 2016 earthquakes: 90% of 118,000 affected households back within 17 days.
• Wrote the first restoration order, approved by the board in 2017 and agreed with fourteen municipalities.

Decisions in context

I came back to Kumamoto to run network and field operations for a company that was, in practice, still seven companies. Each former station had its own operations room, contractor list and way of handling faults. In my first year we built a single network operations centre in Kumamoto, moved all seven stations onto one fault-management system and reduced 61 contractor firms to 52 with common work-order standards. Then, in April 2016, the Kumamoto earthquakes cut service to 118,000 of our households and tested that work in ways none of us had planned for. I led the restoration and afterwards wrote the restoration order that the board first approved in 2017. I also helped found the Minami-Kyushu Cable Mutual Aid Council with operators across southern Kyushu, so that crews and spares could move between companies without anyone negotiating terms in the middle of a disaster.

Reason for the move

Asked to lead the network transformation programme after recommending its design.

Mandate

Bring consistent work standards, cost control and safety to access-network installation and repair carried out by 31 contractor firms.

Outcomes

• Standardised work orders and completion evidence across 31 firms, halving payment disputes within eighteen months.
• Led access-network restoration in Miyagi and Iwate after March 2011; 88% of reachable connections restored within seven weeks.
• Reduced repeat visits on new installations from 11% to 6%.
• Introduced a joint safety review with contractors after two falls from height in 2010; no fall injuries in the following three years.

Decisions in context

Rensei gave me what Kyushu could not: field operations at a scale where a small inefficiency in a work order cost millions of yen a month. I led about 2,900 contractor technicians at 31 firms, installing and repairing access connections for wholesale, enterprise and residential customers from Tohoku to Shizuoka. In my first eighteen months we standardised work orders and completion photographs across every firm, which halved disputes over payment. Then, on 11 March 2011, the earthquake and tsunami destroyed much of our coastal plant in Miyagi and Iwate, and I ran restoration from Sendai for six weeks. Hospitals and government buildings came back quickly because they were on a list; the remainder came back in an order that circumstances chose for us. That experience is the origin of my conviction that restoration order should be decided deliberately. I also completed my evening master's degree during these years. I left when the newly merged Hanagiri asked me to come home.

Reason for the move

Invited by Hanagiri's first president to lead network and field operations after the 2013 merger, which brought me home to Kumamoto.

Mandate

Operate and upgrade the hybrid fibre and coaxial network, and make it dependable through typhoon season.

Outcomes

• Upgraded the network for two-way broadband, growing broadband subscribers from 9,000 to 31,000.
• Introduced the company's first fault-management system, cutting average repair time from 52 to 30 hours.
• Wrote a typhoon procedure that staged crews and generators before landfall; outage hours per customer in the 2006 typhoon season fell 40% on the year before.

Decisions in context

Amane was a small cable company with a public purpose, founded in the 1980s by the city and local businesses. I joined it from the contractor that had built its network, so I knew the plant intimately and the company hardly at all. I was responsible for the headend, the outside plant and eleven maintenance contractors serving about 64,000 households. We upgraded the network for two-way broadband, introduced the company's first fault-management system and built a typhoon procedure that staged crews and generators before landfall rather than after. The community channel taught me that for many older customers our network was how evacuation notices reached the house, which made a fault in typhoon season a public matter as well as a commercial one. I left in 2009 because I wanted to learn how field operations worked across a much larger network, and Amane was too small to teach me that.

Reason for the move

Joined Rensei Telecom to learn field operations at a national scale.

Mandate

Learn every task a crew performs, then supervise cable builds for carriers and cable operators.

Outcomes

• Supervised builds of up to ¥1.9bn, including Amane Cable Television's 2000–2002 network upgrade, completed within budget.
• Recorded no lost-time injuries on sites under my supervision from 1998 to 2003.
• Introduced a splice-testing routine that cut rework on fibre joints by about a third.

Decisions in context

Hiotsu Densetsu built and maintained aerial and underground cable for telephone carriers and cable companies across northern and central Kyushu. I joined as an outside-plant engineer straight from university and spent my first years splicing, surveying routes and supervising pole work. My first foreman insisted that I learn every task a crew did before I directed one, a standard I have tried to keep. From 1998 I supervised build sites with crews of twenty-five to forty technicians, many from smaller subcontractors, and watched how the price a client paid travelled down to the person on the pole. Between 2000 and 2002 I ran the build of much of Amane Cable Television's hybrid fibre and coaxial network in Kumamoto. When it finished, Amane asked me to operate what I had built, and I crossed from contractor to client with a clear memory of how purchase orders feel from below.

Reason for the move

Recruited by Amane Cable Television to operate the network I had helped build.