When obsolete systems started to cause black holes of missing and incomplete data, our customer’s IT department took a leap of faith and hired Hitachi Solutions to modernize its data and analytics estate. Since that first project, Hitachi Solutions has become a trusted, go-to advisor, helping the customer with several more modernization projects, conducting training, establishing performance tracking, implementing self-service reporting and dashboards, augmenting staff to enhance COVID response, and more.
Challenge
Much of the customer’s manufacturing and business analytics data was sitting in old, obsolete, and unsupported systems. Disparate and geographically dispersed, these outdated systems and legacy applications were creating an ever-widening chasm of missing and incomplete information that was negatively affecting the business and causing employees to develop their own rogue solutions.
IT leadership was eager to regain control of their data, step the company out of its comfort zone, and modernize its entire data and analytics platforms with the latest Microsoft technology. However, business support for the effort was lukewarm, and — because the corporation was so large and sprawling — the task was technically daunting. They did not have the skilled and trained resources in-house to tackle such a complex job.
Looking for help, the company originally turned to Microsoft — who referred them to Hitachi Solutions because of our deep technical expertise and breadth of knowledge around the Microsoft stack. The customer was impressed and decided to take a leap of faith and trust us to turn its disjointed and disorganized infrastructure mess into a streamlined and thoroughly modern data and analytics estate powered by Microsoft SQL Server.
Solution
The Hitachi Solutions platform modernization team immediately got to work identifying the systems needing replacement. They were so old and geographically dispersed, that we had to do a lot of detective work to find them. In all, 2,200 legacy databases and hundreds of old applications needed to be scoped for upgrade or decommissioning or tested for compatibility. We also had to migrate all the data, without inadvertently disrupting manufacturing processes and the supply chain.
In the end, we were able to securely consolidate and centralize operational data and reconnect to the missing information through an application information repository with permanent app tracking. We also built a Microsoft Power BI SQL migration dashboard to follow the whole process, report on upgrade activity, and provide management with KPIs.
Hitachi Solutions also upgraded the standard builds to incorporate Windows Server and introduced the customer to, and trained them on, Azure data analytics.
Benefits
The customer’s rejuvenated Microsoft SQL and Windows data and analytics estate is versatile, smart, cost-effective, and easy to support. It’s proved very popular with the IT infrastructure team as well as the business users.
The state-of-the-art on-prem and Azure platforms help maintain our customer’s position of market leadership. Other benefits include:
- Streamlines and speeds data access and enhances reporting for users
- Provides high-performance, low-maintenance databases
- Saves IT money from reduced footprint
- Improves flexibility and scalability to better support growth
- Helps combat the influx of newer, competing technologies
Trusted Advisor
With the success of the initial modernization project, Hitachi Solutions was able to demonstrate our technical know-how, prove the strength of our advisory capabilities, and showcase our value to the IT department. So much so that when the customer decided to standardize on Power BI for enterprise self-service reporting and analytics, IT immediately called us to conduct a training program for multiple business units.
Our 50-person workshops were open to the entire company and completely full every time. Again, we performed excellently, showed our skills, and were able to help the customer meet this strategic initiative.
This success led to a string of digital measurement and performance tracking (DMPT) projects where we worked directly with different business units to create the Power BI dashboards needed for reporting. We trained some departments to do it for themselves, as well as developed and implemented the dashboards for others. An Access to Power BI project soon followed.
More recently they called us for a supply chain analytics initiative. It was a quick project to help ensure customer satisfaction and order fulfillment accuracy post-COVID. The customer was looking to improve analytics and exception handling around the orders coming into the supply chain — to make sure they made the right decisions and asked the right questions of the right people. Despite the tight timeline and the pandemic, we were able to take them from nothing to a fully-live solution in just three months.
True Extension of IT
The bottom line is that with every successful project, we were able to come through for our customer. We have established such a level of trust, respect, and expertise, that they call on us whenever they need help and leverage us as an extension of their IT department.
We’ve proven we are able to provide what is needed — whether it’s advice, knowledge, technology, best practices, or skilled experts.
With Hitachi Solutions as a trusted partner, our customer is able to pivot quickly when needed and be more agile and responsive. This allows them to take advantage of more business opportunities, delight more customers, and increase profits.
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