Business opportunity

On the island of Shikoku, Japan, Shikoku Electric Power Co. provides electricity for two million households' needs. As it drives toward its long-term goal of a decarbonized society, the company aims to ensure a safe and stable supply of electricity.

Guided by its new vision, “Driving Happiness Forward,” the company extended its operations into new industry initiatives that play a vital role in supporting local communities and enriching everyday life, such as information and communications, construction, manufacturing and agriculture, as well as pursuits in the hotel business. Separately, with the advancement of deregulation in Japan's electricity market, applications have grown in both scale and complexity, leading to an increase in systems that require uninterrupted operation 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, as well as the need for incident response regardless of holidays or nighttime hours.

Adding to the challenge is the reality that the IT personnel responsible for managing these systems are approaching retirement age. Relying on certain individuals for manual operations and maintenance has become increasingly unsustainable for long-term system continuity.

Technical challenge

Shikoku Electric Power operates and maintains its core systems, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), as well as the information systems that support employee operations in collaboration with its group company, STNet.

To ensure stable monitoring and operation of its growing systems while reducing the burden on individual IT team members, the company targeted a new approach.
 

Our solution

Together, Shikoku Electric Power Co., Kyndryl and STNet used value stream mapping (VSM) to reassess the company’s IT operations — enabling the IT operation team to visualize and analyze its IT management processes, understand the dependencies between applications and identify bottlenecks in troubleshooting activities.

Using Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk IT Service Intelligence, Kyndryl empowered the company to consolidate and visualize monitoring data in a single monitoring view.

By collaborating with IT experts on these initiatives, Shikoku Electric Power developed a framework to shorten investigation time for recovery areas by enhancing system operation visibility using data, in response to workflow issues identified through VSM.