GlowAwards — Development Story | AMELA Development Portfolio

01

CLIENT

About the client

Nippon Industry Co., Ltd., one of Japan's leading manufacturers.

An industrial-equipment maker with about 3,000 employees across 10 domestic and 2 overseas sites. Each half-year it runs 6 internal awards such as the “Innovation Award” and “MVP Award”, and has worked for years on employee engagement and organizational vitality.

By the nature of the business, the factory floor, the head office, and overseas sites are physically far apart, so running a company-wide awards program in a way that is “fair, fast, and open to everyone” had become a major management challenge for preserving organizational unity.

Employees

3,018 employees

Domestic + overseas

Target sites

12 sites

10 domestic + 2 overseas

Award categories

6 types

Every half-year

BUSINESS FLOW

4 steps of award operations

STEP 01

Create award

HR sets up the award categories each half-year

STEP 02

Register nominees

Enter nominees with recommendation rationales

STEP 03

All employees vote

Vote with one tap from phone or PC

STEP 04

Real-time visualization

Dashboards for management reporting

02

CHALLENGE

Design challenges to solve

Four design challenges that held back organizational vitality.

This was not a technical problem but a management issue directly tied to participation, operational efficiency, and team cohesion — so we had to design from scratch a system in which every employee could participate fairly.

Design challenge ①

How to build a system that raises participation company-wide

Paper ballots were entrenched, but the return rate languished at around 35%. “I forgot” and “no time to go vote” were the main causes, and the awards program was sliding into a hollow ritual.

Design challenge ②

How to build operations that deliver voting results to management the same day

Because tallying depended on manual Excel, announcing results took two weeks on average. Award ceremonies kept slipping later, eroding the sense of immediacy and the organization's momentum.

Design challenge ③

How to connect department- and site-level trends to management decisions

Manual Excel couldn't analyze participation trends by department or site, leaving organizational metrics usable for HR strategy untapped in the award data.

Design challenge ④

How to build a system that also engages overseas, multilingual employees

Paper ballots were Japanese-only, so the ~240 people at two overseas sites effectively couldn't take part, and a “globally unified” company culture never took root.

03

ARCHITECTURE

The architecture we built together

Building all four areas in-house from scratch into an organizational-vitality platform.

With a deep understanding of Nippon Industry's organization and operations, we set out to deliver “a one-tap voting UI for every employee, real-time tallying and analytics dashboards for HR, and organizational metrics for management” — and built, fully in-house and from scratch, an internal awards platform that unifies these three needs on a single foundation.

EXECUTION

4

Duration (months)

24

Total effort (person-months)

Area ①

Voting UI

Challenge

Reliant on distributing and collecting paper ballots, with about 35% participation.

Solution

Vote in one tap on your phone

Pick one nominee from profile and recommendation cards and submit instantly.

Area ②

Tallying engine

Challenge

With manual Excel tallying, results took two weeks on average.

Solution

Real-time tallying the instant a vote completes

Final results can be shared with management on awards day itself.

Area ③

Analytics dashboard

Challenge

Trends by department and site were invisible and couldn't inform management decisions.

Solution

Visualize participation by department and site

CSV export for management reporting comes built in.

Area ④

Global-ready

Challenge

Japanese-only meant about 240 people at overseas sites couldn't participate.

Solution

JP/EN multilingual UI + single sign-on

Overseas employees can log in with their corporate accounts and take part.

TECH STACK

Frontend

React 18

Vite

TypeScript

Ant Design

i18next

Backend

Laravel 8

PHP 8

Passport / Sanctum

Redis

Infra & SSO

AWS Aurora MySQL

S3 + CloudFront SSO Corporate IdP

04

IMPACT

The value the platform creates

Nippon Industry's organizational engagement moves to the next stage.

After adopting GlowAwards, organizational-vitality metrics improved dramatically from the paper-based era.

OUTCOME ①

Escaping a hollowed-out awards program

Participation improved dramatically, and the half-year awards took hold as a “company-wide organizational event”.

OUTCOME ②

Established an instant-publish model

Moved to an operating model that publishes results the moment voting closes, capturing the excitement on awards day.

OUTCOME ③

Feed organizational metrics back into HR strategy

Gained participation data by department and site as a management asset for HR-strategy planning.

OUTCOME ④

A globally unified company culture

Company-wide award operations that include overseas sites became a reality, fostering a one-team spirit.

STAKEHOLDER

General Employee

~3,000 employees

Typically

No time even to pick up a ballot, so taking part felt like a burden.

With GlowAwards

Vote on the commute from your phone — a fun UX that makes people want to take part.

Business impact

Participation 35% → 95%

Successfully rebranded the awards program

STAKEHOLDER

HR Admin

Operations & analytics lead

Typically

Distributing and collecting paper ballots and tallying in Excel consumed a cumulative 2 weeks per half-year.

With GlowAwards

See operations at a glance on a dashboard and invest time in strategic planning.

Business impact

Operations effort cut 80%

A setup that frees HR to focus on strategy planning

STAKEHOLDER

Overseas employees

SG / TH ~240 people

Typically

Felt alienated from the head-office program — hard to feel part of “the whole company”.

With GlowAwards

Can participate via the English UI and share their contributions with everyone.

Business impact

A globally unified company culture

Overseas participation 0% → 86%

STAKEHOLDER

Executives

HR strategy lead

Typically

Award results were just a winners' list — unusable as organizational-trend data.

With GlowAwards

Engagement metrics by department and site become available as data for management decisions.

Business impact

HR strategy → data-driven

Award data feeds directly into vitality initiatives

05

DEMO

Three scenarios

Experience the renewed product in a working demo.

FLAGSHIP

SCENARIO 01 · General Employee

Employee voting flow

·Choose from 6 award categories
·Review nominee profiles and recommendation rationales
·Confirm your vote with one tap on your smartphone
·Visualize interim results in real time

Launch demo

SCENARIO 02 · HR Admin

HR Operations Dashboard

·Create and edit half-year awards
·Register nominees and curate recommendation rationales
·Monitor participation by department and site
·Check the real-time voting log

Launch demo

SCENARIO 03 · Executives

Analytics Dashboard

·Compare participation across company, department, and site
·14-day voting trend
·Visualize participation at overseas sites
·Export to CSV for deeper analysis

Launch demo