An Interview with Jerry Lounsbery of CVi

- Interviewed by Terrie Lloyd -

CVi, established in 1994, provides a personnel database system called JinjiKun. Meeting the complex HR data management needs of today's multinational business environment, JinjiKun has entered service in Japan with both foreign and Japanese companies. CJ asked Jerry Lounsbery, executive president & CEO of CVi Corporation, about the human resources management solution business. Could you tell me about JinjiKun? What are the features of the product? Jerry Lounsbery: CVi developed JinjiKun to achieve efficient management of human resources-related information. The management of HR information is a very time-consuming process due to the vast amount of data that must be handled, including details related to salaries, bonuses, expenses, promotion, training, and retirement. But JinjiKun allows anyone in a client's human resources (HR) section to quickly retrieve essential information and process it in a very efficient manner. JinjiKun is easy to operate, and the HR staff need not have any specialized programming knowledge. One of the most important factors in HR information management software is customization. Lots of customization is required since client companies in various countries have their own requirements for management of data related to employee paid leave, vacation calculations, overtime, absences, salary payments, bonuses, and salary increases. Is it possible to receive reports in English on Japanese data that is stored in Japanese? Then a non-Japanese speaking manager could review reports of data that have been entered by Japanese staff. Lounsbery: That's right. This package will run under an English or a Japanese environment. However, we recommend that our clients run it under a Japanese environment because when you pull up the Japanese screens, if there are no Japanese fonts or environment, you won't be able to read them. We have a report section that serves as the print menu. Speaking of reports, we have a lot of pre-defined reports that customers have specifically asked for that can be exported, since there's a lot of information they want to export to Excel or some other database. However, that alone has not been enough, because a lot of times people want information specifically segregated in different ways. Therefore, what we did was to set up parameterized versions that allowed them to create data sets. Whether it's the employee data, payroll, or bonus sets, the HR people can query and pool the information by, for example, birthday, employee type, or position. What sort of security functions do you have on this package at the moment? Lounsbery: If JinjiKun is going into a client's LAN environment, users have to have a logon ID and password. We can make this as secure as the customer wants. Right now, we typically recommend using a logon ID and password to get access to the package. The entire software package, including the data sets, is encrypted. Even if someone were able to get into the LAN, they wouldn't be able to understand the file contents. It's all encrypted, so it's pretty secure. The other thing that many clients are concerned about is the type of passwords and who can see what. When JinjiKun is operating, there's another security feature that kicks in that says you, as bucho or the director of the personnel department, can see everything, but the staff member who is inputting, say, vacation information, has only limited access. If clients wish, we can go down specifically to the object level, but this is rare because at the object level, it becomes somewhat cumbersome to input information. What's the typical profile of the user of this product? Lounsbery: The company that has between 300 and 1000 employees. However, once a company grows to more than 50 people, JinjiKun becomes useful. What's the base price? Lounsbery: The base price is between 3 to 5 million yen, depending on whether it's a LAN or a stand-alone version. We also offer a JinjiKun light version for 1.6 million yen, for smaller organizations who do not have the extensive reporting requirements of larger multinational companies. How many days does it take to install a generic implementation without too much customization? Lounsbery: Usually, it takes from two weeks up to four to six weeks, depending on what our clients want us to do. Building the SQL server takes about two weeks. The reason for that is we have to migrate all the tables to that particular server, and localize it to the client's environment. Once we finish doing that, we need to test it to ensure data integrity. That's about a two-week process. Lounsbery: We have a candidate database. This is very useful for managing information related to the hiring process. One user of this add-on is a major ERP company who has experienced a tremendous surge of candidates that they intend on hiring. The company bought our package to manipulate the personal and interview information for all these new hires. From this candidate database, the user can transfer the information into JinjiKun. In addition, the product has another function that provides inventory control. A lot of companies want to take their employees' data and link them to their inventory, or their IT department, to check such things as what they are buying, where the purchased goods are allocated, which department will be billed, and how the costs will be allocated. Does JinjiKun integrate with Sun Systems or any of the ERP packages? Lounsbery: No, but we were approached by several companies on this question. We really didn't intend going head-to-head with SAP or PeopleSoft, although on one occasion, we did end up bidding against PeopleSoft and we beat them out on the HR package. There is some ERP software available having an HR management package, such as Oracle and PeopleSoft. But one of the problems with such software is that it is strongly geared towards the US market. You'll find that the Japanese market has a completely different structure. From that point of view, we have been winning in head-to-head competition, especially when serving multinational clients. We provide most of the reporting structure that the multinationals require. Are you targeting multinationals only? Lounsbery: The type of company we want is typically multinational, like a new foreign start-up here in Japan. Interestingly, we are not only selling our products to multinationals, but also to Japanese companies. It was a big surprise to find out that comparable Japanese packages are like glorified resume packages. You could put in resumes and include a nice picture with them, but they don't do any calculations. That kind of functionality is not available in the Japanese packages. I think the people who are qualified to create good software are the American companies, like PeopleSoft. However, their packages are geared towards the American market, and I heard that PeopleSoft places more emphasis on other areas of their package rather than just on the HR side here in Japan. So we don't see much competition at all. When we started to work on our business plan to clearly define our participation in ERP, we noticed that this is the one area remaining untapped in the ERP market. SAP covers the financial side very well, but no one has been paying specific attention to the HR side. How do you perceive the future of this product field? Lounsbery: In the past, the HR field has been perceived as a niche market, but this market has now grown to about $45 billion worldwide. People are starting to realize its importance, and many Japanese companies are starting to wake up. The Japanese market is not a niche market-it is huge-and it will grow in the future. Also, managing HR information is different from country to country. This is because each country has specific laws that are peculiar to that country. To accommodate the various approaches to managing HR information, we would have to establish teams in other countries, such as France, the UK, and the US. We would take the present software package and modify it to be applicable to each region, then we would reconsolidate and create a global interface. Do you do the product development in Japan only? Lounsbery: We have people in the United States and India. That number is growing, and we hope to have offices there soon. One of the reasons is that American and Indian developers are very clever, and doing the work overseas can help us reduce development costs. We'll be doing more of this in the future, and we are looking at Ireland and other European countries, and Australia. It's a slow process, but little by little, we wish to have the luxury of bringing more people in on the fly, train them for a two to three month period, and take advantage of the resulting swift development of the product.

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