MIKIMOTO Co., Ltd

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Using Symfoware Navigator to Build an Open Database System and Promoting Exploitation of Information by End Users

This example is a translation of an article that originally appeared on Fujitsu's Japanese Web site.

MIKIMOTO Co., Ltd, which widely distributes high quality pearl products, including jewelry and gifts, built an "Open DB system". This system enables end users to exploit accumulated data in the core system database.
They are trying to realize strategic business by establishing an environment where information is available for unlimited analysis.
Symfoware Navigator was adopted as the core system. Its high usability provides end users with an advanced end user computing environment.

Exhibiting the Strength of a Top Brand to Develop Business on Multiple Levels

MIKIMOTO boasts over 100 years of history since its establishment. The company has been widely known for a long time as the leading brand of pearls and has also developed a variety of businesses.

Mr. Kiyohisa Okugawa, the manager of the Information System Department emphasizes: "We're distributing not only pearls but a variety of products including diamonds, emerald jewelry, stationery, and table ware. Stationery and tableware of reasonable price especially are always appreciated as gifts."

Recently, some of the world's top brands have launched fully into preparations to gain more of the Japanese market share. MIKIMOTO are providing customers with competitive and excellent products and services. At the same time, they have been promoting global business deployment. "MIKIMOTO has been an established world top brand as "Pearls are MIKIMOTO" but we would like to be able to convince the world of our brand as a jeweler," Mr. Okugawa states as his ambition.

Building an Open DB System to Promote Data Use

MIKIMOTO is positively promoting IT exploitation.
"For more than 10 years we've started internal information, working on the support of managerial decision-making by exploiting information in the database," explains Mr. Yasuhiro Arai, the section manager of the Information System Section of the Information System Department.

However, software to easily exploit data was not available in those days, therefore the User Division had to ask the Information System Division to fetch the required data when needed. Naturally it was not easy to fetch the requested data, as it was inside the core system's database. They called this business process "temporary form output", and it had always caused them a huge backlog.

"We also had a lot of standard output tasks, other than the temporary form output. I think we had about 200 kinds of standard forms in total," adds Mr. Okugawa. This caused a big workload for the Information System Division and the User Division was not able to obtain the necessary information when it was needed.

To solve this challenging problem, the company started to consider building up a framework that makes the core system database available to end users. "If end users are able to fetch data by themselves, the business process speeds up. It helps us concentrate on our own jobs," explains Mr. Arai.

This system is called "Open DB System" and its project started in 1996. Several products were selected as candidates and their functions and usability were compared and discussed. As a result, the R-OLAP infrastructure product Symfoware Navigator was selected. It distinctively provides multi-dimension data analysis and form creation, high-performance, and a highly-reliable RDB engine Symfoware Server.

Symfoware Navigator’s Ease of Use is Highly Praised

Mr. Arai explains why Symfoware Navigator was selected: "Finally we had two candidates and let the staff in the User Division participate in deciding. As a result, we evaluated Symfoware Navigator as eye-friendly and intuitive as it can provide data representation in a table image".

No matter how many functions are built in, there is no point in having them if users are not able to use them in actual business processes. "It does not matter if you are quite experienced in computer technology, but not all of the users are. We made up our mind to quit selecting products which are highly functional and sophisticated but we think are too hard to use," recalls Mr. Okugawa.

A variety of ideas were implemented in building up the system. "Normally you have set the range of data publication before you start building up the system. However, you may not actually be able to tell how users want to use the data. Therefore, we applied the framework so that we can open data as raw as possible, that is, the content of the transactions as they are when building up the system," reminisces Mr. Arai.

This method had potential performance issues but they dared to develop it. As a result, they implemented an environment with greater potential for information exploitation. Moreover, they had additional ideas for a new category key (control point) that uses data values in the database for settings, which enhanced higher available information exploitation. This way, users have been able to analyze information as they want from their own point of views, which upped the reputation of the system very much. Mr. Arai emphasizes, "In that sense, we believe we're not wrong."

Now that the system is in operation, it does not take time to take care of the temporary form output process. Fetching the needed data in the User Division is gradually becoming more conventional. "The number of people who have reached power-user level at using data fetched from Symfoware Navigator, like reprocessing it with Excel or Access, has been growing," says Mr. Okugawa. Installing Symfoware Navigator was beneficial the improvement of IT literacy in addition to the efficiency of business processes.

Symfoware Navigator can Be Used for Marketing and Other Purposes

Currently Symfoware Navigator is installed in three regions; Tokyo, Chubu (central region), and Kansai (western region) and the internal information on sales, inventory, and purchase are distributed to these regions. End users in each region have access to the server in their region and process/exploit the internal information as they need.

"How the information is utilized depends on the division; the Sales Division uses the information to analyze sales patterns and the Product Division to check the inventory status. As jewelry is a product out of high-mix low-volume production, Symfoware Navigator, which provides us with quick analysis of large amount of data, has been working as a highly available tool," explains Mr. Okugawa.

Production of one kind of jewelry is limited to a few hundreds at the most as it needs pearls or jewels as raw materials. On the contrary, the number of the kinds of jewelry reaches more than one hundred thousand. It is substantially impossible to analyze these manually. "Without Symfoware Navigator, we would really be in a trouble in our business. Now this has been a must-have partner," emphasizes Mr. Arai.

Symfoware Navigator was also installed in marketing business processes. Currently, this is used for Direct Mail (DM) business and RFM analysis, (*) but in the future they would like to exploit it to realize a One-to-One type of CRM.

"We will deploy our strategies to make the system easier by Web-enabling it. Hopefully promoting the exploitation of Symfoware Navigator would realize the efficient business processes and profit expansion," hopes Mr. Arai.

* RFM analysis: Analysis of the relationship between the elapsed number of days since the customer last came to the shop (Recent), how often the customer comes to the shop (Frequency), and the per-segment sales amount (Monetary)

Company Overview

MIKIMOTO Co., Ltd
Established: March, 1899
Capital: 0.5 billion yen
Number of employees: 659 (as of February, 2001)
Sales amount: 33.3 billion yen (August, 2000)
URL: http://www.mikimoto.com/
Overview of operations: Widely engaged in not only the business of pearls, but also jewelry and gifts with "challenging an international jewelry enterprise that can create a sophisticated total beauty" as the corporate philosophy. Carries out thorough quality control as Japan's leading jewelry company and has gained a reputation for high reliability from lots of customers. Planning to deploy the business globally and more actively based on worldwide overseas branches.