Mitsui Oil and Gas Builds New Adaptable Infrastructure

Japan’s Mitsui Oil and Gas, the core energy business in the Mitsui Group, produces and markets petroleum products and Liquid Propane (LP) gas. It provides gasoline, light oil, and related products to more than 700 filling stations across Japan and supplies LP gas to over 2 million homes.

Thriving in a Changing Marketplace

The oil industry in Japan, as elsewhere around the globe, has been affected by the trend toward deregulation. To stabilize management infrastructure, many companies have undergone large-scale mergers and formed partnership arrangements. Companies must meet the challenge of mounting market competition by streamlining operations.

Mitsui Oil and Gas has shown continuous growth, despite the increasingly harsh environment experienced by the industry. Its strength lies in its dedicated pursuit of best practices and the speed of its decision-making.

“To respond reliably to diversifying customer needs, we need ever greater organizational streamlining and improved business speed,” explained Akihisa Hamada, director of Mitsui’s Corporate Planning department. “This is why we separated the sales departments of the oil and LP gas sectors of the business. This separation allows us to aim for even more thorough cost management and clearer managerial responsibilities.”

To improve efficiency, the new Oil Sales division replaced its existing branch office system with a regional area system and transferred control of sales offices to a Small office/ Home office (SOHO) structure. “Adopting a sales activity style with strong regional links was intended to develop a close relationship between local staff and customers within each area,” continued Mr. Hamada.

“To make well thought out, speedy management decisions, it is necessary to monitor, in real-time, social and industrial conditions as well as the current situation of one’s own company. Introducing a SOHO system is meaningless if the current results are not available until the following month. The importance of being armed with up-to-date information is more important than ever,” Mr. Hamada explained.

Restructuring Mission-Critical Systems

To meet these challenges, Mitsui Oil and Gas began work on a project to restructure its mission-critical systems. In the past, these systems had run on mainframe computers. However, this infrastructure could not fulfill new business demands for ease of management, adaptability to changing business functions and corporate environments, and greater flexibility.

“For a business that uses information and data, it is necessary to differentiate systems by their component business functions,” Mr. Hamada said. “It is extremely difficult to accomplish this with mainframes. So we abandoned the centralized mainframe architecture in favor of a completely new environment based on servers and packaged software.”

For the LP gas division, this restructuring entailed replacing the company’s entire accounting system as well as the business systems. Mitsui IT chose best of breed, packaged software for each system, rather than replacing all business applications with a single Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package.

Mr. Hamada explains, “When a system is restructured using a single product, it is inevitable that many changes are required. Because of cost and time constraints, we wanted to minimize customization and add-ons. We decided to select the best packages for each task and then combine them.”

Due to the scope of the project, the work was divided into two phases. The oil system, which was the largest, was designated as the second phase. So construction dealt first with the remaining systems.

Interstage Integration Manager Provides the Core

Replacing mainframe business systems with packages makes it possible to streamline the new system and reduce its cost. But if each component of the new system were to operate independently, improving the overall efficiency of corporate management would be impossible. Consequently, Mitsui decided on a central Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and data warehouse system to complement the individual business systems. The EAI application made it easy to build the new system quickly and inexpensively, while providing the flexibility to accommodate future additions and changes.

The new mission-critical systems were arranged in a three-tiered structure made up of data disclosure, data collection, and data registration layers. The data processed by each business system is channeled daily into a central data warehouse using EAI tools and then extracted to a data mart according to its application or objective. The data mart gives users access to the data they need quickly.

The central element that makes the EAI–Data Warehouse system possible is Interstage Integration Manager, Fujitsu’s EAI tool. “When we were planning the new system,” explained Masanori Taguchi, manager of the Information Systems group at Mitsui, “we compared the main EAI products available. Interstage Integration Manager met our functional requirements and was also the most cost effective.”

Flexibility Supplies the Key

Although the ideal approach is to create a system environment using only the latest in standard technologies, in practice this rarely occurs. During construction of the new system, several challenges arose, including the need to link to various manufacturing sites and to mainframes that continued to run until the conversion was complete.

Interstage Integration Manager easily overcame these difficulties. For example, links to manufacturing sites had used the Zengin Basic protocol for line communications and HULFT for file transfer. The Zengin and HULFT adapters built into Interstage Integration Manager made it possible to establish these links without making any changes to the manufacturing sites’ systems. The new system also stores data directly in the data warehouse, which makes for rapid data retrieval and reduced system costs, as opposed to installing a database on the EAI server. The Oracle adapter in Interstage Integration Manager is very useful to link databases that employ Oracle technology. Data that passes through an EAI server is read into a database via the Oracle adapter. Defining the function was the only setup required—no special applications were needed. Now, data is collected on a daily basis using batch linkage mechanisms, such as file transfer and EDI, but in the future, Mitsui will install more adapters to enable real-time links. “When system expansion is later required, it will be possible to link immediately and seamlessly to a range of solutions. This high level of flexibility is the real advantage of Interstage Integration Manager,” Mr. Taguchi concluded.

Fujitsu Provides Essential Support—Now and in the Future

In addition to the rich functionality of Interstage Integration Manager, another reason Mitsui adopted the solution was Fujitsu’s strong service and support infrastructure. “Our IT department has a limited number of people, so it’s not possible for us to manage heterogeneous infrastructure environments easily. Our solution, and the team who put it in place, were critical,” Mr. Taguchi stated.

Fujitsu organized a full team for the project: a project leader, an EAI team, and a data warehouse team. This group maintained close links with each vendor while conducting extensive management of the system as a whole. “Fujitsu’s project leader was efficient and proactive in his efforts to complete the entire project,” Mr. Taguchi said. “He met our requirements well.” The required checks and technical verifications performed by Interstage Service and Support also contributed to building the system quickly.

In fact, Mitsui Oil and Gas regarded Fujitsu’s contribution so highly that it decided to entrust the construction of the second phase—the new oil system—to Fujitsu and Interstage. And the company plans to continue the relationship well into the future. “Because the unification of management and IT is still in progress, we see no end to system improvement,” said Mr. Hamada. “We at Mitsui Oil and Gas will continue to put all our efforts into creating a richer, better environment. We have high expectations for Interstage and Fujitsu’s ideas and support.”