Member Voice vol.2　”Zenport – The DNA of Diversity”

Member Voice vol.2: “Zenport – The DNA of Diversity”

Zenport, with its mission “to connect data, people, and economies to create a sustainable and cooperative world,” is dedicated to forging a world undivided through global supply chains and data integration. We aim to craft a world where people collaborate sustainably and prosperously.

In this second part of our series introducing our diverse team and work styles, we interviewed Fumi, the CEO who launched Zenport’s current services.

Q: First, could you introduce yourself and your background, Fumi?

After graduating from university, I joined Mitsubishi Corporation as a new graduate and worked there for eight and a half years. Following that, I earned my MBA and built my career at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Misumi. At Mitsubishi Corporation, I dealt with overseas sales in manufacturing, acquired scientific approaches for new challenges in various new domains at BCG, and at Misumi, I learned about the manufacturing, retailing industry and e-commerce, understanding how to incorporate customer feedback into business.

It might seem abrupt, but one thing that fundamentally shaped my thinking was the realisation during my childhood that the meaning of things changes with context. While I didn’t have any particularly special experiences, everyday life taught me this – like being considered bright in local school but falling behind in cram school, while I redeemed it somewhat though, or realising that despite being the same person, people’s reactions to me changed drastically when I moved schools or went abroad, and if you can do something interesting, you wouldn’t need to follow a kid boss. These experiences led me to understand that even as one person, my existence could change based on the context I was in.

In other words, things don’t inherently possess an absolute meaning; they are given meaning based on the context. Context and meaning are two sides of the same coin; the meaning is an interpretation based on a certain context.

This realisation made me think that seeing oneself from different perspectives by placing oneself in different situations is intriguing. Something that seems trivial in one place can have value in another. I wondered about ways to make the most of myself by straddling boundaries, moving back and forth between different contexts.

At the same time, while I played the violin, I always had a desire to create something new. However, as with other sports, arts, and academic fields, the world of classical music is an extreme meritocracy where talent becomes evident very early – for example, a prodigy is recognized by the age of five. In this sense, no matter how much effort an average person puts in, reaching the level of a genius – which is, of course, expected of a genius – is impossible. It’s a world where the threshold for creation is incredibly high. Despite wanting to create, I felt inept due to my lack of talent.

As I broadened my horizons, I gradually noticed that there were aspects of musicality that classical music couldn’t express. In university, I became immersed in techno and house music, “four-to-the-floor beats”. During my student days, I would DJ in a small club in Shibuya and organise events with friends. Even after becoming a working professional, I continued to help out at club and outdoor rave events for about five years.

What’s fascinating about club music, including not only techno, house, but also hip-hop, is its sampling and mixing. Even if you don’t have the talent to create music like a great composer, you can still create your own music by combining materials created by others.

(DJs now often use their tracks, but back then,) DJs didn’t even perform their instrument with their interpretations like classical musicians; they constantly quoted and combined others’ tracks to create a flow of music on the floor, interpreting each track in the context of that moment. Here, I found the freedom to create a new context and the joy of seeing how individual tracks change in color and light depending on that context, and that’s why I was drawn to club music.

I also thought at the same time that this could apply to how people gather in organizations. An organization is a mechanism where people are gathered to create new value as a whole, and each person finds purpose, and satisfaction in their roles. For my university (*1) graduation thesis, I conducted fieldwork research on the theme of organisational theory, “Diversity of Interpretation Breeds Creativity.“

Based on these experiences, I came to believe that new value can be created by combining various elements and reinterpreting them from different perspectives. (*2)

Zenport’s vision is “Embrace differences to make a difference.” This philosophy is not only applicable to how Zenport itself changes meaning depending on the context of our customers or integration with other systems but also reflects our business concept, which aims to create a platform where different viewpoints in the global supply chain are acknowledged, and the unique functions and capabilities of many individuals are utilised.

(*1)
Hitotsubashi University – one of the top three universities in Japan for social science -, Faculty of Commerce, Department of Business Administration, Takeru Kusunoki Seminar
In my research, I proposed two organizational typologies based on the strengths of cognitive and demographic diversity. The study examined each type’s leadership styles, decision-making processes, and member engagement. Fieldwork was conducted at two nonprofits supporting the deaf community in Kunitachi City, where my university is located, which provided invaluable insights into these dynamics.

(*2)
On a side note, I believe this way of thinking can also be applied to modern system development.

SaaS is structurally similar in that it involves quoting and combining various libraries and services created by others, starting with servers and infrastructure. Products are selected from the perspective of whether they are useful to customers, and existing technology is utilised in the services we build.

Furthermore, the concept of compound startups, which possess multiple ‘Points of Solution’ and provide complex value delivery based on customer context, is also similar.

Other trends, such as Composable ERP and the shift from unbundling to rebundling, also involve distributed systems being integrated in varying ways depending on the use case, and I think the same way of thinking can be applied here.

Q: Can you tell us about how you joined Zenport and what motivated you?

After graduation from the university, I joined Mitsubishi Corporation with the aspiration to create value by combining various players’ abilities in the value chain. While working with Japanese manufacturing clients, I experienced the shift of manufacturing dominance from Japan to Korea and China. The question remains: How will Japan and other advanced countries with high labor costs survive in such an environment?

Nowadays, due to factors like the weaker yen, wage levels in Japan, and the economic security, there’s a resurgence in manufacturing in Japan, for example, semiconductors. However, Japan has lost its leading position in many manufacturing sectors like shipping building and electric appliances since the 2000s, much like how it overtook the US in the 1980s. During my time in chemical products at Mitsubishi, I saw how Chinese capital-led state-of-the-art factories began selling similar products at lower prices. Also, at BCG, I was involved in project sales to major manufacturers and witnessed the struggles of Japan’s major manufacturing industries.

However, if the inevitable trend is for labor-intensive industries to move to regions with lower labor costs, how can advanced economies like Japan survive? This question remained unanswered.

Later, while working at Misumi, a fabless manufacturer of machine parts, I initiated a business unit focused on VOC (“Voice Of Customer”) and built a system from scratch to leverage customer insights. I believe I’ve read about 30,000 pieces of customer feedback in total. I selected important ones and interpreted them to share them internally. This activity laid the foundation for creating operational, managerial and IT systems to gather voices and translate customer insights into service development. I received an individual award out of about 15,000 employees for this work.

The discovery here was that using customer voices in our services was just like a DJ’s work. Customer voices are interpreted and combined to create a new context. Each voice, excluding those about bug-fixes, isn’t ultimately right or wrong. They’re expressed from the customer’s perspective, biased, and sometimes implementing them as-is could make the service less user-friendly.

By placing customer pain points within a broader, standard usage context, and interpreting them from our service value perspective, we could find concrete ways to utilise those voices.

When I realised this, I felt like the final piece of “creating something” fell into place. Though I had learned various aspects of business through a trading company, a business school, and a management consulting firm, whenever I thought about starting something, it always felt like something was missing. But now, the missing piece became clear. Service concepts don’t emerge from my empty mind but are woven from customer voices, like a DJ interprets what’s in front of them.

With this understanding, many things started to connect.

Regarding my long-standing question about how mature economies like Japan could survive without manufacturing, I thought about leveraging Japan’s knowledge of manufacturing and international trade processes through software, a kind of “commercialization of knowledge.” Japan has had significant successes in manufacturing and overseas trade, so I believed starting this business in Japan would be advantageous. (Although GE did not succeed in this, Siemens seems to be engaging in such business development.)

Also, I found Misumi’s business model (*3) very interesting and thought it could be applied to building B2B services with systems. The concept is “standardised customization.”

This means setting customizable options and variables within a service from the beginning, allowing customization through combinations of these settings. Complete customization isn’t possible, but significant levels of freedom can still be achieved at a low cost with the right settings. (This is also expressed as a contrast between Customizable and Configurable.)

(*3) 

Misumi’s main business is “mass customization of machine parts,” which involves narrowing down the locations and dimensions that can be processed on a machine part and standardising the manufacturing process by making each processing location a variable. 

This approach allows for much faster and cheaper delivery than custom manufacturing.

For some parts, this combination allows for more than a quadrillion customizations, yet the parts can be ordered online and delivered within just two days.

Note that Misumi does not use the term “standardised customization” themselves; this is my interpretation.

When thinking about the business processes of companies, such as from order placement to delivery, there are countless variations for each company and product. However, since each process has a name, there must be a standardised skeleton that can be identified. If meaningful choices and variables for customization can be provided, a platform offering standardised customization could be realised.

At the time, the B2B business software domain seemed like a blue ocean, and I was thinking of starting a business when a headhunting company contacted me by chance. Meeting the founder and sharing the vision of “democratising complex B2B operations” was the catalyst for me joining Zenport. The company’s internationality, operating in English with a global team, was also appealing.

Initially hired for sales, given the business circumstances at the time, my experience in global supply chains, manufacturing, and distribution from Mitsubishi Corporation and Misumi, as well as some strategy consulting experience at BCG, led to me being tasked with redeveloping the product strategy

Q: Can you share the challenges you faced when launching the service?

The primary task was relentless customer engagement. Through this, we hypothesised that the main pain points lay in the coordination among numerous stakeholders. This led to further conversations with hundreds of companies, from trade show exhibitors to business owners, deepening our understanding.

In the supply chain, a single transaction involves multiple processes like ordering, production, shipment, logistics, and inventory management, each managed by different companies or departments. Although everyone is looking at the same transaction, they see it differently – orders are in order units, shipments in shipping units, and logistics in transportation units. Information passes through each process, and each recipient has to convert it to their context, leading to frequent backtracking and reinterpretation. Excel is commonly used in this scenario.

This led to the insight that a transaction, depending on the business process, holds different meanings for different people – like a holograph of intersecting perspectives.

My experience in Mitsubishi Corp, where I facilitated business among various stakeholders, helped me realise that creating common ground and understanding among different perspectives was key.

However, upon closely examining the “unique” Excel sheets of many customers, I began to see a faint outline of a common structure emerging.

Hence, the value Zenport provides is in presenting a transaction in multifaceted ways that align with different people’s contexts. This approach reduces broader communication costs and connects people and operations more effectively.

I, along with a diverse team including a British-French engineer and a Vietnamese-Hawaiian designer-product manager, analysed these complex and frequently changing processes. While the engineer drew schema prototypes on a whiteboard based on our customers’ supply chain data, the designer, passionate about gaming, developed designs to map multidimensional data into a two-dimensional format.

However, the main challenge was data integration. Manual data entry often led to redundant work, and integrating data from multiple sources was crucial but challenging. In the early stages, I devoted an entire summer to data cleansing, integration, and developing data integration features, using all the Excel skills I had acquired at BCG.

Even when customers began using our product, balancing product development and sales was demanding. Members, including myself, spent nights and early mornings building logic in Excel and inputting data.

Typically, in “data integration,” customers prepare data according to the integration service provider’s format. However, to provide truly valuable data representations, we realised the need to discuss with customers how to display their data. Thus, Zenport took on the responsibility of developing data integration methods.

This approach was unique and led to critical feedback from sales representatives who found the product hard to sell due to its intricate nature, and from investors who believed such a specialised service was not scalable.

Each time, I recalled Paul Graham’s words from Y Combinator: “Do things that don’t scale.” I believed that a tool necessary for customers, though not pursued by large companies, could be a meaningful product for a startup. Gradually, as we continued developing and improving, we began to make a real difference for our customers. Today, Zenport has established its own standard data integration platform.

Another challenge was our patent application, which was initially rejected. We had filed for a patent on Zenport’s core function: “integrating multiple source data for visualisation, enabling people with different perspectives to view the same data differently.” The first rejection cited a nearly identical patent in the US. After thoroughly studying the US patent and focusing on differences in function and the unique value we could offer to customers, we successfully reacquired the patent. (Patent No. 6739744: Logistics management device, method, and program)

Zenport has faced various difficulties, but each time we’ve returned to our roots, focusing on customer perspectives and diligently working to improve while offering fresh insights.

Our mission, “To create a common language for the global supply chain,” reflects our journey: to build a platform that interprets and translates diverse perspectives, bringing the holography of transactions into our service.

Q: Zenport is composed of members from different nationalities and backgrounds. What led you to pursue such a diverse organisation?

My significant realisation of the importance of diversity came during my MBA at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. This “Life-Changing” experience stemmed from studying with 90 students from over 40 countries, all learning about global leadership through group work. Interestingly, the school intentionally formed teams unlikely to get along, creating high-pressure environments. For example, teams were diverse in nationality, age, gender, industry, and job type. We were given a business case at 4 pm on the day of the entrance ceremony and had to present as a team by 9 am the next morning.

My first group was notorious for fierce arguments – although we didn’t resort to physical fights, we did storm out of the room, which is called the dungeon, slam tables, and even throw chairs, literally. When a former teammate visited Tokyo from the Netherlands recently, we laughed about how intense those days were.However, interestingly, amidst daily debates, we began to notice that our output improved when diverse perspectives were organically integrated.

The common goal here was to formulate the best strategy for the given business case and make decisions. By giving everything we could towards this goal, and having the team interpret and integrate this information to serve the goal, we were able to produce a very robust output.

The team was composed of members who shared no common points in all respects. Even discussing a single business involved diverse perspectives from engineering, legal, finance, sales, and international development, further enriched by regional differences. By critically and creatively refining our output from such diverse viewpoints, we eliminated blind spots. It was like training every muscle in the body effectively, creating an unshakeable form regardless of where it was struck or kicked.

Also, I was chosen by lottery to represent the school (everyone in the class knew that it was impossible to select representatives through discussion alone, so the lottery was agreed upon without issue). In the European business school case competition, our team, where the other members were exceptionally talented, won. I realised that teams with a so-called “leader” often bear the leader’s blind spots as team weaknesses. In contrast, our method of integrating various viewpoints seemed to maximise the team’s creativity.

However, what truly made this experience life-changing was the transparency that emerged in human relationships beyond superficial differences. Everyone, including myself, has human weaknesses and reflexive habits, but when you truly share a goal, you can overcome these habits to understand and enhance each other genuinely. This involves reinterpreting each other’s abilities within the team context and using them. Having experienced this was profoundly gratifying.

To reach this point, one must be conscious of their unpleasant traits and the insidious nature of group dynamics. The phrase “the elephant in the room” was often replaced at IMD with “Fish on the table.” Recognizing ego, selfish desires, self-esteem, reactions, and implicit collective behaviours and thoughts that protect oneself or provide advantage can transform a group into a more goal-directed and effective team.

A diverse team with various viewpoints, when aligned in one direction, can be incredibly creative and innovative, even if not everyone is a genius.

Diversity, to me, isn’t just about having people of different nationalities, races, genders, or backgrounds. It’s about accepting and transcending differences to create something new. Having a common goal and moving in the same direction is essential, even if opinions and methods differ along the way.

At Zenport, we respect the principle of “Agree to disagree” (*4). Being different isn’t inherently problematic; differences are actually opportunities. Recognizing these differences is the first step, and if there’s a shared goal and will to succeed, these differences can catalyse a chemical reaction that leads to innovative solutions without being ensnared by ego.

These “differences” are perceived through discomfort. Therefore, it’s crucial to adopt an attitude that seeks to understand these discomforts, find interest in differences, accept them, and collaboratively create something better.

Especially in a startup like ours, where the roadmap changes and resources are limited, being able to positively perceive changes and find one’s role and tasks within them is essential. Those who can understand themselves from different perspectives and express themselves positively thrive at Zenport.

This isn’t easy, but I believe, just like at IMD, that my role is to keep Zenport a place where a diverse team can pursue a common purpose and create new value in the global market, making it a life-changing and shared life experience.

(*4) This started with a remark from one of the members.

Q: Do people with diversity share any common traits?

Often, people with an international background are perceived as understanding diversity, but this isn’t always the case. At Zenport, “diversity” means “cognitive diversity and the mindset to utilise it.”

Common traits of people with cognitive diversity include having faced challenges even in adversity. People who can understand their weaknesses and pain and act humbly are able to appreciate diverse perspectives.

In our team, people with cognitive diversity recognize their vulnerabilities and share and utilise these traits within the team.

While it is a constructive criticism, those who do not acknowledge this ability often find it difficult to accept other people’s opinions or different ways of thinking. They also tend to perceive constructive criticism as personal attacks.

I might sound presumptuous here, but no one, including myself, is perfect. Reflecting on myself, noticing ego, selfish desires, self-esteem, and reactions, and overcoming them, especially in a high-pressure environment like a startup, can be sometimes extremely challenging.

However, imagining others’ perspectives, relativizing oneself, and engaging in meta-cognition are essential viewpoints in our service, which connects various people across countries and companies and is intended for large enterprises.

This is vital for developing our service and during customer onboarding discussions, including handling issues, as Zenport must continue to evolve as a reliable service. Preparing to explain our activities and services for enterprises from the perspectives of our customers or stakeholders is a matter of accountability, requiring continuous learning and improvement.

Moreover, in this context, it’s understood that my own actions and thoughts might not always be correct. Therefore, it’s crucial, especially among executive staff, to challenge my views and debate what is correct. People who can engage in constructive criticism, accept it, and build on it are valued and promoted at Zenport.

Zenport is underpinned by one core value and five values, rooted in the idea expressed here: “Set aside ego, personal desires, and self-esteem to collaboratively,  grow together, and collectively achieve something greater that cannot be accomplished alone.“

Core Value: Leverage diversity to drive innovation.

Values:

1. Transparency, integrity, and accountability: Actions consistent with values beyond personal desires and ego
2. Commitment to Clients and Team: Our commitment extends to our clients and our team, ensuring we meet and exceed expectations.
3. Fearlessness: Making bold decisions that push boundaries and redefine norms.
4. Collaboration: Engaging in egoless, equitable collaboration aimed at reaching shared goals.
5. Proactivity: Anticipating the needs of our clients and team, taking initiative to meet them.

I believe these values, which Zenport strives for, are not only vital for our company but are also essential qualities needed in the world today.

After the end of the Cold War and the long era of Pax Americana, the world is undergoing rapid transformations. Often described as a “great division,” I view this as “heterogeneity,” where previously dominant Western values are being relativized.

In this heterogeneous world, Zenport is committed to the purpose of “connecting data, people, and economies to create a sustainable and cooperative world.” We hope to attract individuals who resonate with this purpose.

Q: Could you tell us about Zenport’s future outlook?

Zenport aims to create a world without divisions, where people collaborate sustainably and prosper. This encapsulates our previously stated vision, mission and purpose(*5).

At the core of Zenport’s offerings is “data integration.” I believe that flexible and affordable data integration will be standard in the global supply chain 20 years from now. Already, industry leaders in Japan, recognizable by name, have begun adopting Zenport, and as mentioned earlier, it’s becoming an essential capability for agile strategy execution globally.

If I were to draw an analogy, Zenport is like the SpaceX of global supply chain data integration.

We have transformed data integration for global supply chains, previously a costly and time-consuming process, into an overwhelmingly affordable and rapid service that transcends processes and regions, making it universally visible. This contributes to building a connected world of data, people, and businesses.

Just as SpaceX focused on the lower costs of fuel compared to rocket bodies to enable reusable rockets (since the body incurs most wear during landing due to atmospheric friction), we aim to dramatically reduce launch costs. This reduction has led to a significant increase in launch frequency, profoundly transforming the market and creating new opportunities.

By abstracting and standardising data integration logic, Zenport enables significant cost advantages in data integration. This allows our clients to continuously adapt their data integration to market changes and strategic shifts.

Since the pandemic, we’ve witnessed continuous and significant environmental changes. From the “largest typhoons on record” to “new high temperature records,” climate change, emotional outbursts, and conflicts around the world are becoming more visible. These are signs of deep, underlying shifts such as demographic changes and the movement of wealth, coupled with a significant leap in AI capabilities. The assumptions of the past are fundamentally changing.

Meanwhile, the global economy is more intricately and robustly connected than ever. Although there are calls for supply chain diversification for economic security, and competition for resources among nations is intensifying, it’s impossible to completely sever supply chains like the divisions of the Cold War era. Instead, the world seems like a massive ball of intertwined threads, continuously rolling and changing.

In this challenging environment, large corporations are also evolving their businesses. They are adopting clean energy in response to climate change, strengthening international trade due to shrinking domestic markets, and increasingly focusing on overseas operations. They are also firmly committed to cutting costs.

Post-COVID, the changes in demand, supply, and transport have radically altered, and a strong sense of crisis remains that unforeseeable events may continue to occur. Even the most successful companies, known as excellent companies, despite their high revenues and profits, are unwavering in their commitment to transform all aspects of their business domains, operations, and profitability.

Change demands speed. However, the traditional methods of system integration require years and billions of yen in investments just to adapt to changes. For example, making inter-company transaction data more detailed and visible in real-time, or connecting data across processes in real-time, is essential for changing the data systems to accommodate new realities. This scenario is akin to what Gartner suggested in 2020, before the pandemic, with the concept of “Composable ERP,” which seems to be becoming a reality now.

Zenport, like this, requires a flexible and agile service in response to these demanding times. The trend is toward services that can adapt quickly, which is what we are seeing with the emergence of concepts like “Composable ERP.”

Zenport is pioneering in data integration innovations, enabling agility and sustainability in a rapidly changing and diversified era, aiming to help enterprises to make changes as a strategic partner.

(*5)

Vision: Embrace differences to make a difference.
Mission: Be a common language for the global supply chain.
Purpose: Connect data, people, and economies to build a sustainable and collaborative world.

Q: Finally, could you share a message for those who will join Zenport?

As I mentioned earlier, the world is becoming increasingly diversified. Therefore, there has never been a more critical time to integrate the diverse knowledge and perspectives that each person has cultivated in a diverse way.

Zenport starts discussions from the point of “Agree to Disagree,” and our team focuses on decision-making that prioritises the customer and the business, transcending ego and personal interests.

Under the vision of “Embrace differences to make a difference,” we aim to utilize these differences to “connect data, people, and economies to build a sustainable and cooperative world.”

Life is not long. If, within this life, you can work in an organization rich in diversity, share aspirations, and help create markets on a global stage, it would not only be a life-changing experience but also a life experience in itself. I always consider it my role to make Zenport such a place.

However, working in this way is not necessarily easy. Therefore, those who can confront their weaknesses and discomfort, see themselves from others’ perspectives, and see an imperfect and constrained startup environment as an opportunity for creativity, are warmly invited to take on this challenge at our company.

For engineers and business professionals alike, Zenport is a place where internal and external resources, as well as Points of Solution, are combined in a compound way to create value. If you are interested in creating such value, please contact us. We would be happy to discuss casually or in more detail.

Let’s catalyse diverse ideas, connect data, people, and economies, and together create innovation and the future!

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