Fuji Film Co., Ltd.

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Fuji Film Industrial Materials Division

Since its debut in the Japanese business world as the leading edge query building tool in 1996, Fujitsu Symfoware Navigator has been hailed as the most intuitive, business user empowerment tool for information extraction and delivery. Hundreds of companies have successfully implemented their business information delivery systems using Symfoware Navigator including the following:

Fuji Film's SPEED System for Flexible End-user Business Information Delivery

FujiFilm has long recognized that its operational effectiveness depends on how effectively the business users can utilize and share the massive corporate data being produced by the operational systems of the company. The company implemented a company-wide information sharing environment based on its mainframe facility.

However, the Industrial Materials Divsion wanted to expand its information sharing environment further by incorporating the Division's own specific data. They decided to build a Divisional Data Warehouse with Fujitsu's Symfoware Navigator as the base product for information sharing and delivery.

The Industrial Materials Division develops, manufacturers and markets state-of-the-arts industrial materials for LCD and semiconductor manufacturing devices. The Division has been active participants of the company-wide groupware network for sharing information. The Division's marketing information such as trip reports and product quality information has been shared as forum documents stored in the groupware library.

Mainframe-based Information Sharing Environment

The company's business data is assembled for each division and stored into the mainframe informational database. Each authorized business user can use the appropriate data access programs prepared by the IT department from their terminal and produce necessary reports. Since the system was designed, developed, and maintained by the Company's IT department, the system is well-supported and the quality of information is regarded to be very high.

While the end users were excited about their ability to directly access the corporate data at the beginning, they soon started to realize that there were fundamental limitations in the approach. What these end users were able to do was simply to produce hardcopy reports with canned query programs. To produce such a routine report as a monthly report, for example, each department had to manually key in the printed data from the mainframe. This means that although data was available, there was no easy way to do strategic or tactical planning based on historical information. In some cases, it took a total of 50 hours each month to preprocess the data (copy the hardcopy data back into computer-readable format) before conducting a forecasting exercise.

In addition, business users knew that the mainframe database had some "dimension" data like Product Structure. However, there was no easy way for them to retrieve, process and arrange the necessary items directly from the database.

End-user Empowerment Environment with Symfoware Navigator

To solve these problems, the Industrial Materials Division decided to build a new end user empowerment environment known as the SPEED System with Fujitsu Symfoware Navigator. The SPEED System makes it possible to extract and transfer sales data and inventory data from the operational systems to the Division's database server machine and it allows end users to aggregate or analyze the data freely from their workstations using the network. The most distinct feature of this environment is that its operations are extremely simple to create complex queries, and the query results are given automatically as spreadsheet style tables. In this way, necessary information can be extracted and retrieved to the desktop environment in the way the users want in real time.