Panasonic Industrial Technology Background

Panasonic Industrial Technology Co., Ltd. (PIST) under Matsushita Taiwan Group, when Matsushita Taiwan just established, Matsushita Taiwan only produced radio, record player and speakers, three main products sales in Taiwan; after joining WTO, PIST faced strong international competition and changes in business environment, Panasonic Taiwan developed new plannings to integrate production, development and sales. Currently, Panasonic Taiwan expands business to the fields of home appliances, systems manufacturing, industries components and mechanical equipments in developing good relationships and already extends to family daily life with an excellent name of high quality.

Panasonic Industrial Science and Technology was nominated as outstanding traders by the Ministry of Economic Affairs. In 2006, Panasonic's sales amount achieved NT$ 66.3 billion, and also   quote as 17th in top 500 service sector and 5th in IT equipments sales and service sector in its "1000 Industries Survey"  by Common Wealth magazine. Panasonic currently has hired around 200 employees and the main businesses are as the followings:

1. Imports Japan Matsushita and its overseas subsidiaries manufactured electronic components, computer peripheral products and factory automation equipments, and sell to IT company and IA factories in Taiwan. 

2. Promotes competitiveness electronic components and materials made in Taiwan to global Matsushita Group, and actively exports Taiwan high-tech products; provides Taiwan OEM and ODM manufacturers’ information to Japan Matsushita, and also search for Taiwan competitive OEM and ODM companies to expand export trade to Japan.

3.  Responsible for factory automation equipment sales, installations, equipments maintenance and client training to assist client production efficiency by improvement suggestions.

e-Process for BI System Planning

For more than 40 years, Panasonic Industrial Science and Technology has accumulated substantial data volume, hidden in different departments and business processes. In order to develop effective strategy, each department is required to analyze and understand these growing data as references for important decision-making. As the industry leading pioneer, in 1998, Panasonic Industrial Science and Technology had begun trying to implement Business Intelligence, but it was not enough hardware environment to support this implementation, and the BI concept was not mature internally, so it had encountered BI planning and promotion problems. Even so, the pace of reform and innovation did not stop. After gathering information and assessment, Panasonic Industrial Information Technology Department in early 2006 has been planned specific directions, and was also actively seeking partners to be ready for business intelligence implementation. 

Before Panasonic Industrial Technology implemented MicroStrategy, because of existing old operating systems still running many constraints and inadequate functions, it was not able to allow different departments to process query functions; different departments operated different business contents, so with different requirements for making reports, IT department was required to customize different programs to extract data for making reports by different requests from different departments. Since anyone in this company might request for a customized report, IT staffs need 2 to 3 days to finish operation, there might be human mistakes in customized programs to cause extra human resources, and certainly there were possible extracting not consistent data. Many problems o occurred during decision-making process, and might delay possible important opportunity. In rapidly changing business competition, this is for global Panasonic to improve this situation.

MicroStrategy Implementation 3 Significant Benefits 

To find the proper tools to analyze massive data in day-to-day operations and transform those data to be decision making reference for converting into concrete action, in the mean while, research advantage and disadvantages of each tool for process automation,, Panasonic decided to work with deeply understanding and industry know-how FirstBI professional team to implement MicroStrategy business intelligence platform to create new e-environment.

 (1) 190 million Data in 10 seconds

Because accumulated data volume is tremendous disordered, firstly Panasonic faced the challenge of database integration. FirstBI is very experienced in implementing database integration, and also keep on communicating and correcting specifications from raw data sorting and data extraction, based on EUC (End-User Computing), FirstBI allow users to get query results with simple steps, reports and advanced analysis, and also pass results to users through the Internet, wireless devices, or even voice reminders to increase profit, improve services, manage risks and reduce operation costs. The actual test results, 190 million data was processed within 10 seconds to perfectly combine with database to achieve a satisfied efficiency analysis. 

(2) Reduce 20% IT Workload

Each user needs a tool to analyze and understand these growing corporate data and to precisely and timely make strategy. MicroStrategy business intelligence platform can process complex analysis on these digital assets, at the same time through Web and Windows interface, report regeneration function can be executed on the same operation, data sources and report content.

Report design operation is as simple as basic OLAP analysis to ensure Panasonic users can quickly create their own reports. So after this project was complete implementation, now there is no need for IT to write programs to extract data, and also reduced IT workload up to 20%, virtually Panasonic is also saving considerable cost.

 (3) First Integrated MicroStrategy and SharePoint in Taiwan 

This project implementation started from the end of April 2007, implemented MicroStrategy with SharePoint, which was quite difficult challenge for both Panasonic and FirstBI, and also is a first step in Taiwan IT industry. Such a large scale solutions only took shortly 3 months to complete, finished testing and go live, through SharePoint providing attractive user interface in IT management environment, and also combined powerful MicroStrategy BI analysis function, users are required to enter Panasonic portal and are able to process data query and analysis to meet the requirements of financial management, sales analysis, inventory analysis. Each department is able to retrieve data though the same database, this solved report result inconsistency dilemma in the past.

Go Live in 3 Months - Impossible Mission 

In a short period of 3 months to complete the project implementation, and system go live in 3 months sounded like Mission Impossible, but Panasonic worked with FirstBI to complete this mission together! Panasonic IT senior manager said this project can be quick and successful done, because the companies must first understand their own 『processes』. Enterprise operation or management styles are not similar, if not further clarified, most likely major mistake will be occurred to make work not smoothly, this will delay project implementation time frame. After FirstBI team's continuing efforts and corrections, every staff in Panasonic now can easily analyze the following information:

■ Inventory Analysis: can provide users current inventory situation to reduce inventories, decrease cash flow, while avoiding materials backlog or shortage or can combine historical inventory to adjusted inventory for making right decisions.

■ Sales Analysis: display current Panasonic each business unit sales performance for decision makers to define better sales marketing strategy. 

■Financial management includes: cost analysis, budget analysis and financial management pilot cabin.

■ Cost Analysis: Based on staffs, business units, accounts, time, and suppliers to identify cost. Find out  high cost and transaction-level classification to minimize operation costs, while examinations differences between comparing current actual costs and past actual costs.

■ Budget Analysis: understand the budget of product groups and marketing unit during future specific period of time, management level can process adjustment for unreasonable budget. 

■ Financial Management Cabin: provide financial management cabin for business leaders a business information room and decision-making room, from a macro point of view to show current enterprise management operation to enable better plans and strategy to win the competitions. 

Conclusion

As the 21st century Benchmarking enterprises are required to have the mission of "friendly environment" and "coexistence with the Earth". Based on the challenge of whole Panasonic green 2010 plan, "Environmental Protection is Corporate Social Responsibility"as the basic principle, Panasonic actively reflects in activities, productions and service process to minimize impact on the environment. IT senior manager said expect this business intelligence implementation to change company meeting patterns gradually.  Business intelligence mechanism can be used to discuss issues on same information base and same user interface, no need to copy paper documents for each individual to save more resources environmentally.  This is the direction that Panasonic to continue making efforts in future project implementations.