News

Business Engineering Corporation (Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President and CEO: Masakazu Haneda, hereinafter referred to as "B-EN-G") announced today that Towa Denki Co. Ltd. (Minato-ku, Tokyo, President and CEO: Shinichi Fujimine), a trading company specializing in electronics, has adopted B-EN-G's "Data Utilization Advisory Service for DX Promotion" and has begun building the foundation for digital transformation (DX).

■Background of the Initiative
Towa Denki's main customers include manufacturers in the fields of mobility, home appliances, medical equipment, heavy electric machinery, and IoT devices, and the company conducts business at 25 locations in 10 countries, mainly in Asia. To meet a wide range of customer needs, Towa Denki has established business relationships with approximately 1,500 suppliers. The company is very aggressive in its investment in digital technology to improve business efficiency and productivity among competitors of a similar size, and has introduced ERP "mcframe GA" (developed by B-EN-G) for overseas offices, CRM/SFA, and communication infrastructure including groupware, etc.

Changes in the business environment are accelerating due to pandemics and geopolitical risks. In order to increase its competitiveness, the company is trying to expand its value-added business based on a deep understanding of its markets and customers. To achieve this, the company needed to not only build the infrastructure described above, but also to improve and build a daily system that would allow it to combine the various layers of data accumulated in the company and analyze it from multiple perspectives, from management decision making to sales and marketing activities, and even to improve customer proposals.

Specifically, the company is promoting activities to add value as a total solution that includes not only the purchase and sale of materials and parts, but also processing tailored to the needs of each customer. To this end, the company is also working to create a database of the tacit knowledge of veteran salespeople and pass it on to mid-career and younger employees, as well as a mechanism to improve customer satisfaction by combining data on product processing proposals and business negotiations. These are aimed at revitalizing the company's entire business ecosystem.

■Points of Action
Adopting B-EN-G's proposal, Towa Denki will gradually develop and expand an environment that enables the consolidation, processing, and analysis of data from existing information systems used by each department and business in the company, based on the concept of starting small. To enable flexible operations and maximize the return on investment at each stage of the project, the company decided to use the public cloud to create the foundation for data utilization, and introduced Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power Platform as the core products.

Currently, as the first phase of the initiative, they are working on automating the creation of reports necessary for management decision-making. Previously, data was manually picked up from multiple systems and consolidated into spreadsheets to create materials for management meetings. In the new data utilization platform, necessary data is consolidated on Azure, and reports are replaced with Power BI, creating a system that allows users to check the latest necessary information.

Towa Denki and B-EN-G are working together to build a database on Azure and develop reports in Power BI, and are gradually transferring skills from B-EN-G to Towa Denki. Towa Denki intends to expand the area of in-house production and establish a system that allows for more rapid expansion of the data utilization environment in response to internal needs and business growth.

■Future Outlook
In the second phase of the project, efforts will be made to develop new reports to promote the use of data at the management, middle management, and front-line levels, as well as to build a new database to improve the sales force as an organization.

Towa Denki's immediate goal is to create a corporate culture in which data utilization takes root in every corner of the company's activities, and B-EN-G will provide an optimal support menu according to the phase of the company's initiatives and accompany them in their DX efforts.

■Customer Comments
The cost of creating an environment that would allow consolidation, processing, and analysis of data scattered across various internal systems would be significant, and as a medium-sized company with 250 employees, we did not think it would be realistic for us. However, thanks to B-EN-G's proposal and support, we were able to get a response that we could start small and develop a data utilization infrastructure that would grow in tandem with the expansion of our business. This has also had a positive impact on the construction of our internal structure for DX.

For information on data utilization advisory services for promoting DX, please see the press release from the same day:
https://www.b-en-g.co.jp/jp/solution/news/2023-12-05-b-en-g-dx.html​
Also see the following for customer interviews:
https://special.b-en-g.co.jp/case/towa

■About Business Engineering Corporation
Business Engineering uses IT to support the digital transformation of customers, mainly in the manufacturing industry. We have a rich track record in consulting and support services ranging from IT planning to system construction, implementation, and operation, as well as sales and implementation of our in-house developed packaged software "mcframe." In addition, we utilize data accumulated from core business systems (ERP), supply chains (SCM), IoT, etc. to help improve system sophistication and Kaizen activities. We have overseas subsidiaries in five locations: China (Shanghai), Thailand (Bangkok), Singapore, Indonesia (Jakarta), and the United States (Chicago), and we provide products and services to companies expanding overseas by cooperating with Japan and locally. We solve our customers' management issues.
 Please refer to https://www.b-en-g.co.jp/ for details.

*Company names, product names, etc. mentioned in this news release are registered trademarks or trademarks of each company.