With the number of products handling increasing rapidly, stable operation became a prerequisite. The IT Promotion Department's strength was behind the medium-term management plan.

AS ONE Corporation (hereafter referred to as AS ONE) is a general trading company of scientific and chemical equipment that leverages its extensive product lineup to develop a business model that delivers only what customers need, when they need it, to research, industrial, and medical facilities. As AS ONE anticipates a significant increase in the number of products handled and the number of orders in order to achieve its medium-term management plan, a stable system infrastructure is essential. Data transfer, in particular, has become a problem. With FTP, errors cannot be tracked, and stability remains a concern. To overcome this situation, AS ONE chose HULFT and HULFT-HUB.

solution

• Build an environment where data transmission and reception can be centrally managed using HULFT / HULFT-HUB
• HDC-EDI allows for flexible response to trading partner requirements and easy connection

Benefits of implementation

Background: The pitfalls of a multi-vendor system: The cause of data transfer problems cannot be identified

AS ONE is a general trading company of scientific and scientific equipment with three pillars: catalogs, logistics, and IT. In the area of logistics, the company opened a huge logistics center, "Smart DC," in Chiba Prefecture in May 2020. It is expected to be a player in the new era of highly automated logistics. The company is also actively investing in IT, and has adopted a multi-vendor system, considering the risks of vendor dependency and the benefits of being able to select vendors based on their areas of expertise.

Therefore, they considered introducing a tool to manage data transfer. "There were dedicated products for the mainframe we were using at the time, but they were expensive and there were vendor barriers. We wanted a de facto standard tool that could be maintained by any vendor, and HULFT was the only choice." With support from Fujitsu Marketing, with which they had done business for some time, they first introduced it for one-to-one data transfer between EDI and mission-critical system, core system. Having established stability, they were able to roll out HULFT to other systems as well.

Guarantees the "first in, first out" principle and handles the increased data volume due to the increase in the number of products.

As HULFT was deployed across multiple systems, one issue that arose was the guarantee of "first-in, first-out." "In our business, it's important that the person who places an order first secures the stock first. However, due to file size limitations, there was a possibility that data ordered later would be transferred first," says Hakoda. HULFT-HUB solved this problem. The fact that it guarantees first-in, first-out as a tool, rather than creating jobs in HULFT was a major attraction. Furthermore, with plans to install HULFT on all 34 servers, it was clear that the management burden would increase. They felt that centralizing management with HULFT-HUB would also help reduce the burden.

Subsequently, the company opened up mission-critical system, core system in order to achieve its sales target of 100 billion yen. Even at this time, HULFT-HUB was used to absorb differences such as the expansion of digits due to mission-critical system, core system renewal. The interfaces of peripheral systems remained unchanged, ensuring data transmission and reception as before. DataSpider was also introduced to link with accounting and logistics systems, making data conversion codeless. Furthermore, a system was put in place to extract differences from inventory data in mission-critical system, core system using DataSpider, upload them to Oracle Cloud, and provide inventory information to business partners via RESTful APIs.

They also introduced HDC-EDI as an EDI tool, consolidating the three different EDI servers used for each communication method into one. Previously, they had to ask the vendor for help every time they wanted to connect with a business partner, but with HDC-EDI, they can now increase the number of connections with just a simple setup. Data format modifications can also be handled in-house, and customization to suit the other party is easy, and they are currently connected to over 100 companies. They say that the number of EDI orders has tripled.

Effect: Unifying the flow of data from orders to logistics has made a major contribution to the promotion of the mid-term management plan

Currently, all data, from EDI and website orders to mission-critical system, core system, accounting, and logistics, is managed using HULFT and HULFT-HUB. Centralized management of all data flows allows for accurate understanding of the situation and rapid response in the unlikely event of a problem. "The benefit of being able to centrally manage data collection and send with HULFT-HUB is significant. There's no need to log in to each server, and you can immediately see what's happening and where on a single management screen," says Hakoda. Increasing the number of products was essential to achieving sales targets, and the number has grown from 70,000 to 4 million. The product master file size has also reached 7GB. Despite this, stable operation has been maintained thanks to HULFT, which guarantees that all data, even large files, is delivered.

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