Around 1995, I saw HR staff compare piles of paper time cards and attendance sheets line by line. That scene became the starting point for nearly thirty years of attendance-management DX.
I was thirty-three and had only recently become a section manager. Until then, I assumed a time card simply recorded arrival and departure, and that HR somehow handled the rest.
One morning at the beginning of the month, I walked into the HR office and found several employees placing each person’s attendance sheet beside the matching time card. They were staring at every line—“eyes like plates,” as we say in Japanese—looking for omissions and transcription errors.
I was shocked. An enormous amount of careful work had been happening where I had never seen it.
The thought arrived immediately: why not build the attendance sheet itself inside the AS/400? From there we moved through requirements, design, and display screens together with my department and HR.
I did not yet know the word agile, but AS/400 made small changes practical. We refined the system repeatedly around real operations, while I studied labor law so that the software would reject calculations the rules did not allow.
That was the first step. The system would continue evolving without stopping the work it supported.
CHAPTER 03 · PART 01 · EPISODE 2 / 6 STORIES · 35 STORIES TOTAL