As a company within the Asahi Kasei Group, Asahi Kasei Pharma Corporation is engaged in the manufacturing and sales of pharmaceutical products. According to Mr. Taku Ishiwa, IT & BPR Dept., the organization sets its digital strategy with a commitment to developing digital talent across the Asahi Kasei Group. Employees across each company within the group can voluntarily participate in educational content and acquire digital qualifications. The certification for these qualifications is managed on the “Open Badge” platform, which displays employees’ skills.

 Despite these innovation efforts encouraging employees to obtain digital qualifications, leaders recognized the need to fill the gaps in the company’s capabilities and decided to focus on citizen development. By using Microsoft Power Platform, they aimed to solve business challenges and deliver outcomes by training employees to proactively and voluntarily develop applications to accelerate business innovation.

 The company decided to launch a community initiative called “The Power Platform Dojo” ahead of the rest of the group. Regarding this concept, Mr. Ishiwa explains: “Rather than writing code and developing applications extensively, the goal was to train the operationally proficient workforce to have a certain level of digital knowledge and mindset, enabling them to keep up with digital trends.”

The partner selection process involved comparing multiple vendors, including Avanade. “What we were looking for in a partner was educational content that we could use immediately and that addressed our business challenges,” says Mr. Ishiwa. “After interviewing several vendors, primarily in the IT space, we found that the proposal from Avanade had the most consulting elements. While other vendors mainly proposed standardized training menus, Avanade listened to our needs and provided flexible proposals that addressed our challenges.” 

Avanade proposed unique training content by leveraging Avanade Flexible Support that could contribute to Asahi Kasei Pharma’s business, addressing a wide range of requests, including training in Microsoft Power Platform. Avanade Flexible Support is a service that helps organizations solve their problems and challenges through a time-based billing system. The contracted hours can be utilized for a combination of workshops aimed at problem-solving, practical training on Power Platform, and pre- and post-implementation support. 

Regarding the aim of the proposal, Aya Shimazu from Avanade explains: “From our experience supporting multiple clients, we felt that simply providing training was not enough. There were still significant hurdles for participants to overcome when they returned to their tasks to solve actual problems.”

Avanade highlighted a key value in this proposal: the expert assistance provided as post-training support, which included answering participants’ questions and accompanying them until their knowledge was firmly established. This tailored proposal for their challenges was the deciding factor, leading the organization to leverage Avanade Flexible Support for assistance. Avanade provided a cycle of support, from basic training to application building, to solve their real-world issues, starting in February 2023.

The support mainly included Microsoft Power Platform training for both beginners and intermediate users, as well as individual Q&A consultation sessions. “For beginners, the training focused on simple operational training to understand what Power Platform can do. For intermediate users, the goal was to develop features that address specific tasks in more business-related scenarios,” says Mr. Ishiwa.

To build educational content, Avanade prepared the beginner-level content in advance, while the intermediate-level content was created from scratch through discussions between both companies. Considering that mere functional explanations were not sufficient for learners to grasp the content, Avanade designed the flow and materials in a way that allowed the operational staff to utilize tools to bring their ideas to life for improved operations. This approach ensured that non-IT members could intuitively understand system thinking and implementation skills, and fully absorb the content without feeling uncomfortable. Avanade continuously revised the content based on the company’s reviews to achieve this.

“Although the training was conducted alongside regular operations, we ensured that participants had fixed training times and attended it beside their regular routines,” says Mr. Ishiwa. “If they struggled to understand, we scheduled a weekly session to work together.”

Mr. Ishiwa also supported the participants with meticulous follow-ups. He continues, “It was challenging for participants to continue training alone while managing their routines, making citizen development difficult. For this reason, I realized that Microsoft Power Platform is a tool that allows people without IT expertise or programming skills to solve their business problems.”

Training itself began in February 2023, and was conducted entirely in three sessions until December 2023, with a total of approximately 40 participants. The attendees came from various departments, including sales planning and management, research, manufacturing and administration. For the invitation process, Mr. Ishiwa explains that they assigned training coordinators in each department, who conducted open invitations to encourage volunteers

to participate.

The first round was performed as a test, and the team made enhancements in the second and third rounds based on the lessons learned. For example, in the first round, they did not actively seek commitment from the participants’ supervisors. However, it became clear that time allocation, motivation and the output of the participants were affected, so they encouraged supervisors to agree in advance for the staff to participate in the training. These efforts increased the quality and satisfaction of the training.

Embrace the low-code revolution to accelerate innovation, drive agility and efficiency and create business value with Avanade’s Microsoft Power Platform services.