Intending from the outset to work in a global environment, it was ironically while studying overseas that Ami Inomata decided she ought to first learn more about her own country.
On an exchange program to the University of Washington in Seattle as part of her course at Kobe University in her native Hyogo, “I realized after I went to the States, that I knew very little about Japan. I thought it might be better to go back to Japan and start at a domestic business rather than an international one.”
“Many people I met in the US liked manga, animation and were keen to learn about Japanese culture. They clearly described what Japanese culture is or what they liked about Japan. But I didn’t have such strong feelings about Japan at that time.”
Her degree at Kobe was a “kind of hybrid,” of law, along with international relations, politics, economics and business administration. A blend that would stand Inomata in good stead for the broad range of industries she went on to work in.
Domestically international
Though she elected to join a firm in the domestic market, it had a major dash of international flavour: Tohmatsu Tax, part of the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu group. And Inomata worked for Japanese multinational clients on their global businesses. She describes the small Osaka office at the time as having a startup feel about it and she relished the opportunity to work with accountants, lawyers and economists. Nevertheless, after three years she sought out a new challenge, a recurring theme in her career.
Joining GE’s finance division, now part of Shinsei, in 2005, Inomata dove headfirst into BPO (business process outsourcing) and was promoted to manager in just her second year at the firm. She also then relocated to Tokyo, where she implemented the Lean Six Sigma process improvement approach, a methodology with roots in Motorola’s response to Japanese kaizen manufacturing models.
To add another layer of complexity, GE’s local finance operations were taken over by, and integrated into, Shinsei, “a pretty traditional Japanese bank.” Always taking the positive perspective, Inomata says, “I learned a lot during this transition period.”
Never standing still
During her six years at the company, Inomata’s daughter was born and she began juggling motherhood with ever more demanding professional roles. She considered relocating with the bank back to Osaka, but with her husband also working there, was concerned that in the event of a restructuring, “…we both might be losing our jobs.”
In the end, she opted to stay in Tokyo and take on another role, this time at NN Life Insurance (formerly ING) in 2011, where she became a project manager for a cross-functional team of more than a hundred. During her four years at the firm, she got her ‘black belt’ in Lean Six Sigma, took both of the major project manager certifications (PMP and PRINCE2), and gave birth to her son. Nevertheless, Inomata felt a desire to test herself further.
After returning to work for a year following maternity leave, she interviewed for a job at Walmart, which at the time was running the Seiyu supermarket chain, and joined in 2015, initially in the same field.
“I had been in project management for more than 10 years by then and thought it might be better to take more ownership of organizational change and financial impact. After one year, the position of general manager of the Produce Upstreaming division came up. It was a three-year project to integrate a third-party vendor, an operation centre.”
After three years of this demanding undertaking while raising two children, Inomata confesses to feeling, “a kind of burnout.” Rather than a break, her response was again to take on something new.
Getting straightened out
In 2019, Inomata began work at the Japan operations of orthodontic company Invisalign, which was undergoing rapid growth, a stark contrast to the domestic retail sector. By 2022 she was responsible for the firm’s expansion in APAC while interacting with its multinational global workforce.
With an apparently insatiable appetite for new challenges, she began an executive MBA in April last year, before moving on to lead the launch of SPS Japan in October. Inomata says she was “pretty impressed” with the Swiss BPO specialist’s plans for investment in Japan in the immediate aftermath of Covid and further expansion in APAC.
Against the backdrop of the ongoing labour shortage and plenty of inefficient entrenched back-office processes still to be found in corporate Japan, there is much to be done.
“Our mission is to integrate the physical and digital worlds. And I think this is very much the time that Japan needs to be transformed.”
Text: Gavin Blair for SCCIJ.
