Konica Minolta, Inc. announced that it will launch DX Support Platform for Local Governments (DX Support Platform), a new service to help local governments throughout Japan implement DX, on 1 July 2021.
Japanese local governments have experienced unprecedented manpower shortages in recent years, partly because of the ever-increasing workload per employee caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters, and partly because of the rapid aging of employees. Under the circumstances, local governments have high hopes that digital transformation (DX) will dramatically enhance productivity and solve ongoing problems.
Implementing DX inevitably involves a large amount of streamlining and standardising of work processes. Past experience has shown that a suboptimal approach to system unification cannot solve fundamental problems. The standardisation of digital systems, which starts in FY2021 at the initiative of the Digital Agency, is inextricably associated with the streamlining and standardization of work processes.
Recognising the importance of combining the system standardisation with the work process streamlining and standardisation, Konica Minolta has developed a method for applying its BPR approach, which it has created through its long history in the manufacturing industry, to the streamlining and standardisation of local administrative work in cooperation with more than 50 local governments.
The DX Support Platform service enables the government-wide classification of jobs that can be done only by government employees and those that can be done by non-government employees by visualising work volume and procedures in a comprehensive manner. The service thus facilitates workload reallocation by automating and outsourcing jobs that can be done by non-government employees but have been conventionally done by government employees, using robotic process automation (RPA) and AI-OCR technologies.
In this way, the service allows government employees to concentrate on the jobs that only they can do and reduces their excessive workload, thus helping to improve public services. Furthermore, it can assist the business continuity planning (BCP) of local government employees when mobilised to respond to an emergency.
Konica Minolta aims to extend the DX Support Platform to 100 local governments during FY2021 and 1,000 local governments by FY2023 in cooperation with all its business partners (34 companies as of June 2021).
DX Support Platform is offered at a subscription license fee of ¥900,000 ($8,127/€6,803) per year (excluding tax), in units of 30 user accounts in a package.
