Abstracts of Magazine FUJITSU 2014-9 (Vol. 65, No. 5)

Special Issue: Industry and Distribution Solutions

Open Innovation Generating New Research and Development

• Approach to Open Innovation for Japanese-Style Drug Development

In order to deal with diseases that cannot be completely cured by conventional drugs, such as cancer, Alzheimer's disease, mental diseases and geriatric diseases, biotechnology-based drugs developed by bio-ventures from academia are the mainstream in the West. In Japan, where bio-ventures have not been developed, pharmaceutical enterprises are actively acquiring overseas pharmaceutical enterprises and bio-ventures in an effort to catch up. As Japan is now entering a super-aging society before other countries and excessive imports of bio-drugs are becoming an increasing concern, the development of new drugs following bio-drugs has become an important theme for the revitalization of Japan. In this situation, open innovation involving parties from academia and the manufacturing industry that are entering the medical equipment market is desired so that the Japanese pharmaceutical industry can survive the global competition. Fujitsu can take advantage of the high quality of the FUJITSU Life Science Solutions tsPharma/tsClinical, which has been achieved through its long-standing efforts to meet drug regulations, and apply them to clinical research led by academia, thereby helping to smooth the transition to drug development and shorten development periods. This paper describes Fujitsu's approach for realizing a Japanese-style drug development scheme.

Product Life Cycle Management to Support Monozukuri

• Contributing to Business by Making Use of Intellectual Property Big Data: Utilization of Intellectual Property in Age of Open Innovation

Ten years have passed since it was proposed to establish Japan as a nation based on intellectual property, and enterprises still continue making efforts with activities related to linking together and fusing the three areas of business strategy, R&D strategy and intellectual property strategy. Among important challenges that enterprises have been facing in their recent open innovation strategies is how to incorporate external intellectual property, in addition to their proprietary technologies, into their own competitive advantages. In reality, not many enterprises have sufficiently succeeded in making use of intellectual property in their business or R&D strategy. Under these circumstances, Fujitsu has also been striving to contribute to business by utilizing intellectual property; one solution we have been working on for a few years relates to supporting business by making use of "intellectual property big data." This paper describes the "intellectual property portfolio activity" that we have practiced for business units by actually using intellectual property big data. As a specific example of the activity, we present a successful case in which an intellectual risk identified in a business unit was avoided and converted into a strength of a company. It also explains how information and communications technology (ICT) and Fujitsu's solutions can be used for making the most of intellectual property big data.

• Process Innovation in Upstream Process of Manufacturing

Recently in the Japanese manufacturing industry, enterprises have been reconstructing their business strategies in the global market. With the maturation of advanced country markets, expansion of developing country markets and improvement of manufacturing competitiveness in Asian countries including China, the environment surrounding the Japanese manufacturing industry has been undergoing dramatic changes in these past few years, which has made the situation tough. Above all, enterprises are rapidly localizing their production sites along with market globalization and they are facing major challenges: delayed launch of mass production due to insufficient skills of local personnel, and higher costs incurred by preparing for production. To solve these challenges, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is becoming essential. PLM is a strategic integrated solution for constructing the next-generation development/design and manufacturing environment encompassing the product planning phase, development/design, manufacturing sites, sales, support, disposal and recycling. The general design information management system "PLEMIA" presented in this paper is a solution that provides the core of PLM. It is capable of managing product-related information in a centralized way throughout the entire product life cycle and thus it facilitates manufacturing from the upstream process of design and strongly supports enterprises in the building of a manufacturing environment that can flexibly adapt to changes in the market. This paper describes a case of applying PLEMIA to the construction of an integrated design environment and mentions process innovation achieved by sharing data between the upstream process and the processes after design completion.

• SCM Innovation in Manufacturing: Reform into Global Management

As the Japanese domestic market has now matured, the importance of overseas markets is increasing for reasons including the rising demand created by the fast-growing economies of developing countries, and so Japanese enterprises continue to develop and expand their businesses internationally. Along with these changes in the global market environment, reforms such as optimization are required for supply chains. This paper discusses the present state of Japan's manufacturing industry that has complicated supply chains, which support the "monozukuri" (manufacturing) of Japan, from the perspective of constructing a supply chain management (SCM) system, and identifies challenges. It takes up challenges that may be met in constructing an SCM system (sharing of components, centralized management of data and grasping of various types of information) and describes how the challenges can be addressed by making use of information and communications technology (ICT). It also presents an outline of the next-generation SCM and its features for reforming business operations into global management and realizing business innovation for customers.

• Approach to Reform of Maintenance Operations in Manufacturing Industry: From Protective Maintenance to Proactive Maintenance

In the Japanese manufacturing industry, which is exposed to a global environment, competition with developing countries is becoming increasingly intense and reducing costs by revising supply chains has reached its limits. With the advance of technological innovation, the functions of various products have become roughly the same, which makes it difficult for enterprises to differentiate the products themselves. In order to deal with this market environment, it is necessary to increase market competitiveness and improve profitability by creating new added value throughout the entire life cycle of products. This paper focuses on the area of after-sales services of the manufacturing industry and discusses an approach to carrying out a reform and going from protective maintenance to proactive maintenance by a combination of added value creation and maintenance cost reduction. It describes a case in the photocopier industry in which added value was created in the after-sales service area to improve profitability and Fujitsu's approach that successfully achieved stable operation and improved service quality. It also presents how maintenance will be in the near future using new information and communications technology (ICT) by utilizing machine to machine (M2M), big data and smart devices and Fujitsu's solutions that help enterprises to enhance their after-sales services.

Corporate Governance to Support Creation of Value Shared with Society

• Approach to Global Management Solution

Fujitsu's global management solution is a service that builds a mechanism capable of offering information to help enterprises make company-wide business decisions quickly and at low costs without imposing a burden on overseas group companies. This is achieved by integrating management information in the head office without requiring global enterprises to standardize the systems of overseas group companies. One challenge that global enterprises are faced with is how to govern overseas group companies that are geographically distant from the head office. In order to solve this challenge, a solution is required that can turn the management technique that has depended on a workforce into a system to sophisticate and improve the efficiency of management. To meet that expectation, Fujitsu has launched the GLOVIA global management solution (GMS) and started applying it practically. This paper first clarifies the challenges faced by enterprises, based on which it describes the concept of how to build a global management system, system architecture for realizing a "data integration approach" and the present conditions and future challenges, together with their solutions as provided by the global management solution.

Big Data Utilization for Marketing Innovation

• Utilization of Information in Big Data Age

Making good use of massive amounts of various data that exist in and outside enterprises, or so-called "big data," to analyze consumption behaviors that are becoming increasingly diverse is expected to bring significant value to corporate activities including the development of new products and services and efficient acquisition and development of customers. This paper presents Fujitsu's activities related to big data in two categories of business. First it covers the retail industry, in which corralling consumers through various types of contact information (an omni-channel approach) is urgently needed. It describes an information and communications technology (ICT) platform for analyzing the consumption behavior information of the exploding number of diverse and ad-hoc customers to visualize the needs of certain customer groups, and a service scheme for providing an opportunity (workshop) to use information on the front line to formulate measures. Second, activities by food manufacturers in the marketing area are explained. As mentioned above, the Internet buyer group is expanding along with the omni-channeling in the retail industry, and this has caused a diversification of promotion channels from promotion based on TV commercials to a type that includes Internet ads. In this way, the food distribution industry is undergoing a sea change with big data as the keyword. Among food manufacturers, which are in the upstream of the industry, there is increasing momentum to utilize data and data analysis for effective marketing by having more finely focused targeting than ever.

Response to Supply Chain Transformation

• Approach to Value Chain Market of Food and Agriculture

As consumers are keeping an increasingly closer eye on food safety, farmers are met with the challenge of "producing safe and high-quality agricultural products." Meanwhile, food manufacturers are required to tackle the challenge of "stably procuring high-quality agricultural products (raw materials)." And to meet these challenges, there is an active movement among food manufacturers to newly enter agricultural production in the form of corralling farmers. In response to this trend, Fujitsu is taking an approach to construct a "food and agriculture value chain market" that realizes a linkage from production of high-quality agricultural products through to their procurement, processing and sale using information and communications technology (ICT). This paper presents the linkage between FUJITSU Intelligent Society Solution AKISAI and FUJITSU Enterprise Application GLOVIA smart FoodCORE (the latter is for the food industry). It is utilized to facilitate various services including cultivation of agricultural products; visualization of quality; harvest time and yield prediction; unification of quality and standards; reduction of production costs for agricultural products; and provision of safety and security to consumers by carrying out quality assurance.

• Digital Marketing in Omni-Channel Era

Recently, the term "omni-channel" has come to appear increasingly frequently in various media. This term is spreading surprisingly quickly as compared with other terms because E-commerce (EC), or the purchase of items on the Internet, is rapidly becoming widespread. Another reason is that attracting customers to brick-and-mortar stores, which has been implemented for some time, and subsequently re-transferring them to online stores have become essential actions for enterprises in terms of their marketing strategy. We are now in the era where consumers always carry smart devices and can acquire and send information in any place. In addition, the elderly are increasingly purchasing items and products online. This paper presents an ideal form of the Internet and store services from the customers' perspective and describes measures for improving the value of customer experience (CX) to be offered by enterprises to consumers. The term omni-channel came about from integrating the concept of CX value improvement and marketing strategy. This paper also gives the whole picture of the most important marketing measure—offering the optimum experience value at the optimum timing to "individual" customers via diverse customer contacts, or achieving this by an omni-channel approach.

• Approach to Logistics Providing Support for Corporate Activities

As the sales turnover of the distribution industry decreases, marketing areas shrink and the significance of the Internet grows in society, the front lines with customers are now expanding from corporate sites (stores) to households and even consumers (individual customers). With these social changes in the background, seamless delivery of "mono " (Japanese word that can mean "products") at more optimized costs and timings is very important in realizing the "koto " (Japanese word that can mean "services") desired by individual customers in society and the market. In the field of logistics, efficiency improvement and cost reduction are demanded more than ever and utilization of information and communications technology (ICT) that supports logistical operations is becoming increasingly important. Fujitsu has provided various logistics solutions up to now. We are now aware that it is important to improve the linkage between solutions, and to enhance and upgrade their functions in order to allow for quicker business judgments and operational improvements. Hence, we are driving innovation in logistics solutions with the Logifit series. This paper identifies the issues based on the conditions of the logistics industry and mainly describes operational solutions that solve them.

Global Development and Support

• Enhancement of Global Solution Delivery Platform "Fujitsu COE"

Globalization of customers' businesses is ever expanding and Fujitsu is offering business solutions for various business categories to provide support on a global scale by making use of information and communications technology (ICT). On top of enterprises expanding their overseas businesses, corporate mergers and acquisitions are taking place frequently and ICT governance must be smoothly exercised across such enterprises. In order to standardize business systems, software solutions, services and platforms of the same specifications are required in all parts of the world as if they were prerequisites. In addition, an increasing number of customers are pursuing "Japanese quality" and basing their operations on the Japanese "monozukuri" (manufacturing) spirit. Japanese-owned enterprises that operate overseas, in particular, now need to provide products comparable to those available in Japan and offer high levels of services so as to support the growth of customers as a global partner. Fujitsu intends to actively deploy and enhance worldwide "Fujitsu COE," a delivery platform that globally offers standardized and high-quality solutions and services, aiming to help customers formulate and implement their ICT introduction plans.

Modernization for Innovation

• Fujitsu's Idea of ERP Modernization

In order to keep up with rapid changes in the recent business environment, enterprises must identify customers' needs more quickly and accurately to offer products to them at appropriate timings. To that end, they must use information and communications technology (ICT) not merely to improve efficiency and reduce costs, but also to ensure that customer systems can work in real time, be interactive, and be easy to operate and maintain, along with achieving innovation, so as to increase customers' corporate competitiveness. Furthermore, what is required is to innovatively apply ICT to the strengthening of customers' corporate competitiveness. There are already some examples of customers implementing these advanced approaches. Among them, we take up SAP, the mainstream enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that provides the core of mission-critical systems. SAP is significantly expanding its framework from the conventional business-application-based ERP to acceleration by in-memory technology, improvement of user experience and provision of a cloud. In addition, there are many systems that have been in place for over 10 years and it is time for the owners to revise the entire system operation platform including its operation and maintenance. This paper describes Fujitsu's general idea about ERP modernization that takes advantage of SAP's and Fujitsu's new solutions for business innovation by presenting some scenes of application and practice.

• Full-Scale Application of SOA for Innovation: Rebuilding of Mission-Critical System of Yamazaki Baking

The key to an enterprise being able to stably continue operating is how well it can flexibly adapt itself to the ever-changing trends of society. At times, it is necessary to change the existing business model itself, rather than just making small alterations. This may involve, in addition to changes in business operation, makeovers and major lterations of business systems that have been used, and such actions will have a tremendous impact on the related systems and functions. Changing systems that are stably operating is a risky job. Yamazaki Baking Co., Ltd. is one enterprise that has been faced with some challenges: to have fast systems and to minimize the cost of adapting its systems to changes in the market. Fujitsu proposed and constructed a service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform to meet these challenges. The SOA platform-based system presented in this paper allows an enterprise to accommodate various system changes, and this helps it to quickly adapt to changes in the market and reduce costs by eliminating the need to make changes to the related systems and functions. Another benefit of the SOA platform is its scalability, and using an SOA platform will make it possible for enterprises to more flexibly adapt to business innovation in the future.

Architecture to Support Solutions

• Information System to Accelerate Business

Changes in the social, economic and business environments, such as the falling birthrate combined with aging population, economic growth of Asian and Middle Eastern countries and increasing entries into the domestic market by various industries, are beginning to exert an impact on enterprises in Japan, regardless of the categories of business. One factor in these changes is the rapid development of information and communications technology (ICT) today. Pioneering enterprises with a high level of ICT utilization have been quick to grow out of a general utilization level, exemplified by applying ICT to improve operational efficiency. They have been successful in realizing real-time sensing of consumer trends, prompt operation and creation of new customer values by more strategically making use of ICT to drive their business and made inroads into overseas markets and markets of different industries. This paper shows a concept of how enterprises can utilize ICT to work on creating new customer values and strengthening competitiveness in view of changes brought about by the development of ICT in the social, economic and business environments. It also presents an ideal form of information system that combines existing business with business innovation and helps enterprises to create customer values and strengthen their competitiveness, together with Fujitsu's activities.