Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd.’s (KHI) Aerospace Systems Company, a leading Japanese aircraft and aircraft engine manufacturer, has selected the SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing solution for production engineering and operations.

Mike Lackey, SAP Global Vice President of Solution Management, Manufacturing, said:

“Industry leaders like KHI are choosing SAP to help better understand their manufacturing frontlines in real-time to improve production outcomes.” 

According to Lackey, the chosen SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing solution can easily adapt and satisfy KHI’s business needs as the company evolves and grows in Japan and around the world. 

KHI aims to go paperless and eliminate rigorous manual tasks in its manufacturing processes. With SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing solution, the global company intends to enhance efficiency in its operations and provide greater detail in traceability and disclosure to its customers by digitalising massive quantities of materials. 

The Japanese manufacturing company will be leveraging SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing solution for production engineering and operations that is built on SAP S/4HANA platform and known to deliver an enhanced, comprehensive, and simplified user experience. This functionality facilitates enterprise-wide manufacturing collaboration within an integrated SAP S/4HANA environment helping KHI streamline processes by centrally managing design and manufacturing bills of material (BOMs) for aircraft and reflect changes at the design stage.

More so, SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing solution for production engineering and operations delivers integration of engineering and manufacturing BOMs required for large and complex assembly including manufacturing in the aerospace industry.

The SAP solution helps prevent production delays and the need for design rework by allowing technical requests to be transmitted accurately and completely to manufacturing sites including sudden design changes. Highly detailed traceability and enhanced work efficiency through the digitalisation of work processes is also anticipated to be delivered by the solution.

KHI aims to use the data and insights gathered from business processes to further improve production activities as the SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing solution propel the aircraft manufacturer’s digital transformation.

More about SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing solutions

Both SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing solution for planning and scheduling and SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing solution for production engineering and operations are built on the same SAP S/4HANA platform. The solutions’ benefits and features are as follows:

• On-premise deployment
• Enhanced manufacturing collaboration enterprise-wide
• Enriched and seamless digital manufacturing capabilities
• Real-time enterprise analytics for better decision-making

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Japan has established a reputation for manufacturing and exporting high-quality consumer products. The country has been one of the leaders of globalisation alongside being leaders of the electronics and hardware industry in the 70s and 80s. 

Some of the top Japanese companies, such as Sony, considered hiring non-Japanese upper management leaders as a way to build trust and confidence and also branched out R&D centers around their global units.

Eventually, the rest of the world caught up. China and South Korea were able to penetrate the consumer electronics and hardware market. Whatever product Japan produced, China and South Korea would have something to compete against it.

The Economist published a report in 2011 that told the story of how Japanese companies struggled with expanding to a global market. Why? It is because they put too much of their focus onto the local customers, which delayed efforts to build their international reputation.

However, this doesn’t mean that all Japanese companies failed to “globalise.” Let’s go through some companies who found the right globalisation strategy and succeeded.

Leveraging the advantages of a non-Japanese leadership

The conservative mindset included avoiding foreign leadership into home-grown companies. However, Japanese companies hired foreigners for various reasons. These include the experience and stand-point of a non-Japanese leader when it comes to opening a new branch on foreign soil. 

Additionally, some company leaders decided to adopt English as the official language in their office. One of the best examples for this is Hiroshi Mikitani, Rakuten’s founder. Rakuten’s venture to speak the global language of business made it to the list as a globalisation success story.

Meanwhile, top global brands such as OPPO, McDonald’s, and Nestle, have found ways to localise their products to adapt to the Japanese lifestyle.

SAP Japan makes VAT processing simple

In Japan, companies are required to calculate the deductible VAT purchase. There are country-specific rules that impact the calculation for taxable sales ratio, and many more.

These are tedious tasks related to taxes that require manual processing and data extraction, calculations, and other legal matters. SAP Japan provides solutions to help reduce the manual efforts for the process.

The era of glocalisation has come. The Japanese businesses are finally improving forward with a fresher mindset and SAP Japan is definitely one of those that will stand behind its progress.

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Lancers has utilized the Open Talent Platform Concept to implement SAP Fieldglass, which integrated both Palaft Co., Ltd. and Persol Holdings Co., creating a database that connects individuals to a broad range of networks within the SAP community. The program uses an analytics suite to better manage their external workforce, such as contractors, temporary staff and freelancers. Recently, Shareful – an on demand matching platform – has been launched to this purpose. 

“We agreed to promote data linkage with the cloud solution SAP® Fieldglass® provided by SAP Japan.

Lancers website: https://www.lancers.co.jp/news/pr/17451/

SAP Japan confirms SAP users can now access a wide range of freelance talent while contributing to the promotion of corporate business growth. The program will allow for collaboration between companies using SAP Fieldglass, and will assist in optimizing their selection of external sources.

 “Our vision is to create a society where everyone can work in their own way with technology.”

Lancers website: https://www.lancers.co.jp/news/pr/17451/

The collaboration will benefit freelancers and part-timers, allowing them a broader scope to take advantage of opportunities offered by SAP companies. 

“SAP Japan welcomes Lancers’s announcement of the solution collaboration with SAP Fieldglass from the heart. As a means to solve the labor shortage in Japan, the collaboration of the freelancer is indispensable… We confirm that SAP users can connect with more freelancers and contribute to the promotion of freelancers at the same time as corporate business growth, and prepare training programs for SAP consultants whose needs are increasing. Also, I look forward to Lancers’s activities.”

Satoshi Osawa, General Manager, SAP Fieldglass Business Division, SAP Japan Co., Ltd.

Currently, the companies are considering providing education and training programs for registrants of Lancers, to develop their knowledge and capabilities relating to SAP introduction consulting. This will greatly increase the opportunities for pairing companies with individuals, while at the same time, expanding individuals own application possibilities.

“Through this initiative, we will support the improvement of skills and the transition to new areas…it becomes possible to source human resources from a wider range of options.”

Satoshi Osawa, General Manager, SAP Fieldglass Business Division, SAP Japan Co., Ltd.

SAP Japan was established in 1992. SAP is an industry leader in cloud technology, using advanced analytics and machine learning to help people and organizations make better business decisions. 

Read the announcement from Lancers Inc (Japanese)

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Since 2014, Tokyo Energy and Systems has deployed over 1,400 SAP licenses in an ERP implementation to centrally manage codes used for nation-wide construction sites. The licenses were issued for payroll and accounting, inventory control and work management. However, due to heavy user training requirements, the implementation took two years rather than the planned one year.

The customization and running hardware on the existing infrastructure became cost prohibitive to maintain. Last year, Tokyo Energy and Systems began migrating to a third party Infrastructure as a Platform solution whilst conducting a review of heavy support costs. Rimini Street, a global support provider for SAP software products, was selected to provide third party SAP application support.

Kotaro Matsuhashi, manager of ICT Promotion Department, Tokyo Energy & Systems, said:

“We were able to centrally manage construction sites by implementing the SAP platform, however the delay in getting the system operational greatly exceeded our planned schedule and the enormous costs to operate the system became a problem… Switching to Rimini Street, and migrating to the cloud, has allowed us to save substantial budget that has been used for updating our IT environment for construction sites across the country as well as improving our internal operational efficiency.”

With rapid response support in place, Tokyo Energy and Systems was able to drastically reduce time spent on custom system issues. This reduction in time, cost and resources, along with a 50{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} saving in annual support fees, has enabled Tokyo Energy to focus on and invest in advancing their IT department. Yukihiro Kurihara, executive officer and general manager of the ICT Promotion Department, Tokyo Energy & Systems, said:

“Leveraging Rimini Street services, our support costs were cut in half and we were able to free up internal resources which was a welcomed change. This allowed us the opportunity to take on new IT challenges, and work toward the actualization of our own business-driven IT road map versus following the road map of the vendor. Part of our future plans include extending our business to post-construction operation management of power facilities.”

Read more about Tokyo Energy and Systems Inc.

Read the Rimini Street press release

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The Japanese multinational automotive manufacturer will use the platforms to help regulate the group’s accounting system in line with global standards, by creating a centralised information sharing system to help the company respond rapidly to business and market changes.

“As a global leader in automotive manufacturing, we turned to SAP to help us build the infrastructure of Toyota’s new company-wide accounting information system. We are excited to reap the benefits of faster response times to growth strategy decisions and latent and future risks in our business,” said Hiroaki Kitazawa, Toyota executive general manager and field general manager of the Information Systems Group.

By operating both transactional and analytical data processing in real time on a single platform, Toyota Group will be able to perform core functions such as high-speed bill of materials (BoM) explosion, and develop new applications.

“We are confident that with the integrated use of both SAP S/4HANA and SAP HANA, Toyota Group will see improvements in the range, volume and speed of information management,” said Yuzuru Fukuda, president and representative director, SAP Japan.

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Takeshi Sone, general manager, solution business promotion department, IT platform products management division, Hitachi, said by 2020, SAP HANA is expected to be widely used by enterprises.

“To support this trend, Hitachi Ltd is expanding our SAP HANA infrastructure and strengthening our cloud service, empowering Japanese on-premise SAP HANA users to move to the cloud. This shift will reduce day-to-day resource requirements for system setup through operation for SAP HANA implementation and improve application performance, minimise system downtime and drive greater business process automation and efficiency. The partnership Hitachi Ltd has with Commvault allows us to meet the growing demands for cloud solutions and maintain quality customer satisfaction levels.”

According to Commvault, its back-up services will bring multiple advantages to the Hitachi HANA Cloud Service, including increased integration allowing direct backups of the SAP HANA database; deduplication of backups to decrease overall size; a unified user interface to support Sybase and VMware databases; licensing based on 1TB capacity units; and support from the Commvault engineering and customer support teams as well as Hitachi.

“We are excited to partner with Hitachi, Ltd around their growing cloud services offerings. With Commvault, Hitachi, Ltd can empower businesses with end-to-end data protection, simplified management and portability of SAP data. This allows companies to access and understand data quickly, thus providing them with a solid, unified foundation to derive deeper business insights and gain a competitive edge,” said Yuichi Tawara, vice president for Japan, Commvault.

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Krish Datta, CEO, Asia Pacific Japan and the Middle East, BackOffice Associates, said on the appointment, “This is a significant step for our business in the region and cements our commitment to Japan, especially at a time when Japan is going through a phase of change and openness.

“With our local office and staff, we will bring the much-needed expertise around modernising and transforming data from legacy systems to newer cloud and hybrid applications like SAP S/4HANA, SAP Ariba, Infor and others. Our deep skills and experience around implementing the best budgeting, planning and financial reporting systems, will also be of interest to businesses in Japan.”

Hashimoto has 28 years of experience working in high-level technology roles in Japan, having held executive positions with Indian and US-based IT companies.

“There are vast opportunities to help modernise companies in Japan, starting with improved data governance. Better data assets will lead to better customer satisfaction and business processes,” he said. “Big enterprise is Japan knows it has to change, but there are countless data silos and legacy systems that need to modernise. BackOffice Associates works across CRM, ERP and S/4HANA, to support all of the initiatives and systems that lead to modernisation and business development.

A key focus in Hashimoto’s new role will be growing BackOffice Associates’ business in markets such as finance, insurance, manufacturing, retail and transportation, with more hires to be added to the Japan team soon.

“Data is a critical element of success for any company across all markets, and with over 500 large enterprise customers globally, BackOffice Associates is uniquely positioned to help. We can initially focus on their pain points and then grow with them to support their data and quality governance efforts,” said Hashimoto.

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Founded in 1970, SISCO has a history of making astute business decisions to maintain its competitive edge. The company has been running its SAP system since 2006, is now on release ECC 6.0.

“At the time of its introduction, we were completely satisfied with the functionality of our SAP system in terms of the automation of in-house mechanisms to carry out tasks, and found that it met our business needs perfectly,” said Shuji Takahashi, director, information systems department, SISCO.

“On the other hand, we felt it was a huge disadvantage to keep paying costly fixed expenses for its maintenance and operation, even though it was running smoothly,” said Takahashi, explaining the subsequent transition to Rimini Street for his Tokyo-headquartered company.

Rimini Street is not new to the demands of leading Japanese clients.

“As with many of our clients in Japan, Saison Information Systems is focused on maximising the value of their significant investment in SAP software and optimising the return on current IT expenditures,” said Yorio Wakisaka, general manager, North East Asia, Nihon Rimini Street.

“We are pleased to help our many SAP clients in Japan, including SISCO, to cost-effectively run their current robust SAP releases for a minimum of 15 years, and allocate IT budget to more strategic initiatives that engage customers and drive competitive advantage,” said Wakisaka.

Takahashi said the fact that each Rimini Street client is assigned a dedicated local Primary Support Engineer (PSE) was an important consideration in SISCO’s decision to choose the provider.

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The alliance will see the two companies offer a standardised portfolio of cloud migration and SAP cloud products for enterprises, systems integrators and value-added resellers, enabled by Velocity’s Cloud Application Management Platform (VCAMP).

Under the auspices of the alliance, MKI will be responsible for sales and marketing development, advanced customer service and integration management.

“MKI’s focus is to optimise customers’ SAP systems, alleviate the complexity, and reduce the TCO for Japanese businesses migrating to the cloud,” said Shinji Kawashima, executive officer, MKI.

“Our partnership with Velocity means our customers and partners achieve immediate benefits from cloud migration and management solutions without the large upfront costs and skills enhancements typically required with these transformations.”

VCAMP provides application lifecycle management, service optimisation and analytics through unified multi-cloud application management console. According to Velocity, for complex applications such as SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA, the platform offers the opportunity to simplify an organisation’s cloud transformation, shortens time to innovation and accelerating cost savings through rapid provisioning, automated migration and intelligent application lifecycle management services for SAP applications, both in public and private cloud landscapes.

“Our VCAMP for SAP software defined applications management product portfolio delivers rapid-deployment services, advanced applications lifecycle management, and application analytics. VCAMP for SAP enables our customers to expand use cases and attain immediate business benefits without the high cost, complexity, or commitment required with traditional approaches,” said Ravi Padmanabhan, vice president for the SAP line of business at Velocity.

“As one of Japan’s leading providers of enterprise cloud services, MKI’s strength in cloud transformation projects and customer support will deepen the value we jointly deliver with VCAMP for SAP.”

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Following the eight month implementation, up to 18TB of data is now being collected from thousands of sources across the country, including approximately 2400 Docomo Shops with almost 37,000 employees, as well as call centres with more than 10,000 operators.

NTT Docomo was seeking a new IT platform system to strengthen its competitive edge, propose and deliver services to meet customer needs, enhance its data utilisation and improve the operational efficiency of its sales team.

“We are honoured to have been entrusted by NTT Docomo to build its data visualisation platform,” said Rohit Nagarajan, vice president, digital enterprise platform group, SAP Asia-Pacific and Japan.

He said that SAP HANA is ultimately benefitting NTT Docomo’s customers by providing the company with access to simplified data visualisations as well as accelerated insights from the massive amounts of data the company processes.

“Before we implemented the new system, we lacked the capability to deliver information to the sales force,” said Taku Hasegawa, general manager, information systems department, NTT Docomo. “It took the back-end office at least a week or two to generate and deliver information. Now with SAP HANA, users can pull out the latest data whenever they need to.”

He said the company expects to see significant customer service improvements resulting from the new platform, which enables the company to identify areas of operational improvement at the network of Docomo Shops across the country and which also provides the ability to uncover and share best practices for applying insights and lessons among the individual stores. As an example, he cited the new ability of individual stores to monitor the status of sales promotions as one factor leading to increased performance.

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