From the vendor's side of the contract to the client's

My mother kept the dispatch board for a carrier of eleven trucks in Ogaki, where my father was one of the drivers. The board was a whiteboard in the kitchen of the company office: each truck a column, each day a row, each driver's name written in a different colour. I learnt to read it before I could do long division. What I remember most is my mother rubbing out a run she had already promised a customer because the driver had been out too late the night before. She lost the job. She said the truck could wait and the man could not.

I studied information engineering at the Ibukiyama Institute of Technology and stayed for a master's degree, finishing in 1997 with a thesis on routing vehicles to customers who will only receive goods within fixed windows. It was elegant mathematics and almost useless in practice, because it assumed drivers never tired and docks never queued. I joined Kotoshiro Systems, a fictional independent systems integrator, in April that year as a systems engineer in its transport and distribution practice.

At Kotoshiro I learnt how Japanese corporate systems are actually built. Between 1999 and 2001 I was a junior member of the team that wrote the freight-charge settlement system for Seriyama, a Nagoya trucking company: COBOL on an office computer, with a rate table for almost every customer relationship. From 2002 I managed projects of my own, the largest employing sixty people, of whom only fourteen were Kotoshiro staff. The rest came from second- and third-tier subcontractors, some of whom I met only at the cutover party. I came to understand that the people who held the knowledge were the people with the least authority and the shortest contracts.

In 2007 I moved to the client side, joining Amabe Industries, a fictional listed maker of seat frames and door mechanisms in Okazaki, to run the systems that exchanged orders and delivery instructions with its assembly-plant customers. The earthquake of March 2011 showed me how dependent those customers were on information arriving from suppliers who had lost power, buildings and people. In October that year floods inundated industrial estates north of Bangkok, including Amabe's main Thai plant. In January 2012 I went to Bangkok to rebuild its systems and stayed until 2016 as regional IT director for seven plants in Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. I learnt working Thai, how to run a team whose members were cleverer than their job titles, and what it costs a customer's assembly line when a supplier's server room sits under a metre of water.

In 2016 Seriyama hired me as general manager of IT planning. Mid-career hires into general-manager posts were rare there, and I owe the appointment to a president who wanted someone from outside to examine what the company had stopped seeing. On my first week I found the settlement system I had helped to write, still running, now on hardware whose maker had announced the end of maintenance. Four people in the world understood its rate engine, all of them at a third-tier subcontractor of my former employer. I spent the next four years designing its replacement and persuading the board to fund a phased renewal instead of the fixed-price rebuild Kotoshiro proposed.

I became executive officer and chief information officer in April 2021 and representative director of our IT subsidiary, Seriyama Information Systems, in June 2022. The work since has been shaped by the April 2024 changes to drivers' working hours, which turned our dispatch system from a scheduling convenience into the place where the law is either kept or broken. I insisted that the system refuse assignments that would breach statutory limits, against the strong preference of our operations executive, and I still think it was the right call. I have also taken our waiting-time data to the shippers whose docks consume our drivers' hours, and I led the group's response when the data centre hosting our food warehouses was attacked in November 2024.

I lead 220 people. I ask them to sit with dispatchers at a different depot every quarter and to bring back one thing the system made harder. I keep a short list of decisions that belong to operating executives and not to me: which customer to serve, whether a run is safe, what we promise a shipper. My job is to make sure those executives decide with accurate data and that the systems hold the line the law draws.

Inside the industry I am known for three positions. Driving-hours rules should be enforced when a run is assigned. Waiting time at a shipper's dock is a shared problem that needs shared data. And a Japanese company should keep design authority over its own systems instead of buying it back from the top of a subcontracting pyramid. I am now preparing for a different role alongside my executive one: a single outside directorship, where those habits would face a board's questions from the other side of the table.

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Languages / Japanese · English · Thai (working knowledge)