IR

1) A Full Line of Support for Working Women

Since our initial nanny service offering, we have supported working women with child-rearing, elderly care and household chores support services. These services include corporate nursery services, event childcare, home-based elderly care, childcare and after-school facilities, day care facilities, and foreigner household chores support services. With an eye to the future, we will deliver our full line of services while refining and expanding our service lineup to the modern workplace.

2) Digital Transformation (DX)

We are proactively working on DX to improve productivity and add value via ICT and AI.

We developed in-house the Poppins App in February 2019. This is an app-compatible version of the Poppins System online placement service that allows users to reserve babysitters from the Web. The Poppins App has a function that serves as a contact point for all the services we provide. This means it is possible to use child-rearing and elderly care services in a one-stop service.

We established the new Digital Transformation Division in January 2020. The purpose of this is to promote such activities company-wide and strategically to lead to business expansion. We started providing the online childcare that we had been preparing ahead of schedule from March 2020. That was in response to the needs of the users of childcare facilities that closed or asked for users to refrain from using them due to COVID-19.

We also started providing on-demand, paid-for programs (e.g., English conversation and exercise classes) in addition to regular childcare services (e.g., storytelling and dancing) in our online childcare services.

By combining online childcare and real childcare, we quickly arrived to market with an interactive and hybrid childcare solution. This allows us to provide Poppins Edu-care anywhere anytime. Our online consulting for parents allows us to go the extra mile supporting working parents.

Our nap check and temperature measurement systems are examples of measures we will develop to improve the operational efficiency of our childcare facilities. Moreover, we are realizing an improvement in productivity with an automatic voice reservation system while improving babysitter matching accuracy through the development of automatic matching AI.

Our eye is always on the future and improving the client experience. For example, we will develop an AI concierge that supports interactive communication with customers and provide a reservation service through data analysis by aggregating a variety of information.

3) Quality (Maintenance and Improvement of the Quality of the Highest Standard of Edu-care and Elderly Care Services)

We take various measures with an awareness to continually provide our customers with the highest standard of services.

Investing in our personnel is one way we honor this commitment. From level-based training, to specialty training, e-learning to hands-on training camps at the Poppins Tateshina Training Center, and finally, research and overseas training in collaboration with our university partners, we strike a multi-faceted and comprehensive approach to developing our talent.

Moreover, we established the Poppins Childcare Management Course through industry-academic cooperation for the first time in Japan with Ochanomizu University Graduate School in April 2021. Our intent is to meet the diversifying needs of parents by equipping our nursery teachers with advanced learning including management studies.

We have received various high ratings through these measures to maintain and improve quality.

Our service offering matches the urgency, convenience and sense of security our customers seek. That’s why it’s 24 hour a day, 365 day a year of support available from PC or smartphones. We strive to match the best nanny to all same-day orders, accepting children even when they are sick. It’s also why we go the extra step of enrollment and consultation visits with our coordinators.

In our family elderly care business, we strive continuously to improve the quality of our services based on the ISO 9001 initiative. For example, we give thorough education and training based on our own in-house standards for recruitment and hiring of care staff drawn from home-based care expertise accumulated over many years in our nanny service business. Furthermore, we work to enhance the capabilities of our coordinators who select personnel compatible with the characteristics and circumstances of each client and family. In the event of a complaint, we take thorough corrective and preventive measures.

We have developed the Poppins Approach – our original approach to childcare – in our Edu-care business. Under this approach, we are expanding early childhood education with three techniques: documentation (periodically recording children with photographs and videos to visualize the learning process), the development pathway (listing the development pathway from the fetal period to preschool and then utilizing it in childcare) and mindset (childcare that adopts an approach to aiding and encouraging further growth without fear of failure).

Our eight areas of intelligence refer to: language, music, logical mathematics, spatial skills, physical exercise, natural science, social skills, and self-acceptance. Coined “Intelligence 8”, we are intent on meeting children where they are at and developing them accordingly.

Our classrooms specialize in Edu-care. At our early childhood development facilities, we provide English, science, art, music, and gymnastics, as well as entrance exam prep classes for well-known private schools.

• Active Learning School (ALS)
  Poppins Active Learning School located in Tokyo Midtown in Roppongi is an educational facility that supports the independence of children with a cutting-edge educational program developed for children from 10 months old to pre-school age. Our specialist instructors teach science, music, art, linguistics, and more with the Reggio Emilia approach. Our approach to childcare stemmed from joint research at the Poppins International Institute for Child Sciences (PIICS) and Project Zero at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
• Poppins Active Learning International School (PALIS)
  Our international school in Ebisu, Tokyo.
  In renovating this facility into the international school version of the ALS in April 2014, we expanded its target age from birth to five years old. We have a partnership with Norland College in the UK that is known as a professional training institution for early childhood education. This school follows England’s Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) educational guidelines for children from birth to age five. Our program serves as the starting point of global education with the emphasis on active independent learning in English. EYFS addresses the first stage of a child’s education by stipulating certain standards around the quality of learning, development and care before children enter primary school. In England, compulsory education begins from age five. Accordingly, PALIS covers early childhood from birth to age five, stressing the importance of authentic experiences in early childhood. For example, there are teachers who have experience working in Disneyland in the US, complete with authentic instruments and special attire. Our science, art, ballet, dance, karate, and other hands-on classes are all taught in English. Our customers include foreign nationals such as embassy officials and expatriates in Japan working for foreign-owned companies.
• Poppins Edu School
  Cofounded with ALS, this school prepares young children for kindergarten and elementary school entrance exams. With flexibility for nannies to see off and pick up children, we accommodate working parents who had previously given up on such exams.

We also started a program called Poppins Plus in July 2020. The purpose of this program is to give children first-rate experiences from infancy. We provide extremely high added value services also utilizing the Internet. These services include an exercise and dance program with former Olympics athletes and dancers, English lessons with native speakers and exam consultations.

We were the first childcare provider in Japan to become ISO9001 (Quality Management Systems) certified in 1999. Through that process, we developed our quality management system, grounded in the PDCA cycle of quality target setting, execution, evaluation, and improvement, which we attribute to our gains in client satisfaction and service quality.

Furthermore, we received the Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Prize at the Nihon Japan Service Awards^*1 in June 2016 in recognition of our accomplishment in continuing to provide a high-quality nanny service to support working women for more than 30 years.

We received a rating of “satisfied” from 98.0% of respondents on average in all our facilities in a customer satisfaction survey that was conducted in FY2019. Moreover, all respondents stated they were “satisfied” in 70% of all our facilities.

Smart Sitter Inc. (now: Poppins Sitter Co., Ltd.) earned top spot in the 2017 Nikkei DUAL "Matching Babysitter Service" ranking for its high quality and reliability. Along with this recognition, our membership base has grown approximately five-fold over the past decade.

We have entered into babysitter corporate contracts which allow employees of contract companies to use our service as corporate welfare services with approximately 600 companies. We have also seen our home visit childcare business (licensed business utilizing babysitters) in eight out of the 23 cities in Tokyo^*2.

^*1 The Nihon Service Awards is the first award program in Japan that recognizes innovation and excellence in services.

^*2 As of November 2020