Keiko SatoChief Information Officer · Essays & perspective
Chief Information Officer / Japan
Keiko Sato
In Japanese trucking, the decision that keeps a driver within the law is taken at the dispatch desk, so that is where my systems must be strictest.
Leadership paper / 01
Driving-hours compliance5 min read
Dispatch systems that respect the driver's working limit
Abstract
Japanese carriers still check drivers' working hours after the month has ended, through attendance and payroll records. The rules are kept or broken earlier, when a dispatcher assigns a run, and that is where the system has to hold the line.
Carriers often treat records of waiting at customers' docks as private ammunition for rate negotiations. I think they should hand the records to shippers as shared evidence, in exchange for the advance information that lets carriers plan.
Japanese companies have long bought system renewals as fixed-price projects from integrators who subcontract the work several layers down. The fixed price caps the bill but moves design decisions out of the company, and the renewal deadline is where that bargain fails.
In Japanese trucking, the decision that keeps a driver within the law is taken at the dispatch desk, so that is where my systems must be strictest.
I am the executive officer responsible for information technology at Seriyama Logistics Holdings, a fictional trucking and warehousing group based in Nagoya and listed on the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In the year to March 2026 we earned ¥214.0 billion, almost half of it by moving parts to car assembly plants in the order their lines consume them. The rest comes from chilled and ambient warehousing for supermarkets, chemicals haulage and forwarding in Thailand and Vietnam. Four thousand seven hundred of our people are drivers, and about 820 small carriers move two-fifths of our long-distance freight.
My route here was unusual for a Japanese company. I spent ten years at a systems integrator in Tokyo and Nagoya, where one of my first projects was the freight-charge settlement system Seriyama still ran when I joined it in 2016. I then moved to the user side at an auto-parts maker, and spent four and a half years in Bangkok restoring and running the systems of its Asian plants after the floods of 2011. Those years taught me what a vendor sees and what a client does not, and how quickly a supply chain stops when one link loses its data.
Since April 2024, when the 960-hour annual cap on truck drivers' overtime took effect, my work has been organised around one conviction. Rules about working hours are kept or broken when a dispatcher assigns a run, not a month later when payroll counts the overtime. I have spent three years building systems that act on that conviction, renewing the settlement platform I once helped to write, sharing waiting-time data with the shippers whose docks consume our drivers' hours, and preparing the group to keep trucks moving when a supplier's network fails.
No line-haul driver over the overtime cap in two years
Our dispatch system now refuses any assignment that would breach a driver's statutory rest or the 960-hour annual limit. Average annual overtime for our 2,150 line-haul drivers fell from 1,020 to 780 hours, with ¥3.1 billion of spot and night business declined and a 6 per cent rise in base pay.
A twenty-five-year-old settlement system retired in waves
Three of four business lines have moved off the office-computer platform that calculated ¥186 billion of annual billings. Shipper-specific rate tables fell from 14,200 to 2,900, billing disputes from 1,900 a month to 620, and the month-end close from nine working days to five.
Waiting at customers' docks cut by more than half
Forty-one of our sixty busiest shipper sites now exchange arrival and dock data with us under a reciprocal agreement. Average waiting there fell from 112 to 44 minutes over eighteen months, and charges for waiting beyond thirty minutes brought in ¥640 million in the year to March 2026.
A supplier's ransomware stopped at our boundary
When the data centre hosting our food warehouses' management system was attacked in November 2024, we severed every link within seventy minutes. Fourteen warehouses ran on paper for four days, the incident cost ¥520 million, and forensic work found no encryption in our environment.
Current focus
I am preparing the final and largest wave of the settlement renewal, which moves automotive billing in January 2027, two months before the old platform's maintenance ends. Beside it, I am extending the shipper data agreement to the partner carriers who haul for us, so that their drivers' hours are planned with the same care as our own.
Conversations I welcome
I intend to stay at Seriyama through the renewal and beyond it. I would consider one outside directorship at a listed Japanese company outside logistics, automotive supply and our customers' industries, contributing on information security, operational risk and workforce data. I can give about twenty-four days a year with my board's consent. I accept a small number of speaking invitations from logistics and technology audiences.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
Formation
Bachelor of Engineering, information engineeringIbukiyama Institute of Technology · 1995
Master of Engineering, operations researchIbukiyama Institute of Technology · 1997
Keiko asked me to let a computer refuse our dispatchers, and our operations executive asked me not to. I decided for her because she had already priced the consequences: the relay yards, the business we would decline and the pay rise drivers would need. She did not present it as a technology project. She presented it as a decision about what kind of carrier we were.
Shigeru OkanoyaFictional President and CEO, Seriyama Logistics HoldingsThe full record ↗
Contact
I intend to stay at Seriyama through the renewal and beyond it. I would consider one outside directorship at a listed Japanese company outside logistics, automotive supply and our customers' industries, contributing on information security, operational risk and workforce data. I can give about twenty-four days a year with my board's consent. I accept a small number of speaking invitations from logistics and technology audiences.
