Fujitsu is committed to making the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation. Fujitsu Uvance, a solution that was launched in 2021, promotes business focused on solving social issues to achieve a sustainable world. “The key focus areas of Fujitsu Uvance include the four cross-industry verticals that envision the society of 2030 and three horizontal technology capability areas that support these verticals,” says Ichiro Aoyagi, co-head of Solution Service Strategic Unit at Fujitsu. “One of these is Digital Shifts, which consists of data-driven and work-style innovations.”

Data-Driven Management is also a major theme of Fujitra. With the OneFujitsu program as its specific measure, the company aims to standardize four regional groups, group management and business processes, data, and IT to achieve one function with one system. “In an era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, the future is difficult to predict, and reacting based on only past experience and knowledge is not enough for the company to survive,” says Aoyagi. “The goal of data-driven management is to implement it on the basis of fact-based management and transform into a future-focused management."

In 2021, the company launched the new organization Data Analytics Center (DAC) and started working on OneData. “The DAC promotes the use of data close to management and the field, and in addition to the thorough use of OneData, plays a leading role in changing the culture within the company and training data personnel,” says Eiji Ikeda, Head of the DAC, Business Management Unit at Fujitsu.

In developing OneData, one of the concerns raised was the use of data across the company. In the past, data was distributed in data warehouses for each business unit or group, so it was essential to build a common solution for the entire company. “The goal was to streamline the analysis operations and discover unseen connections between the business departments,” said Yoshiyuki Doi, senior director of enabling technologies, Digital System Platform Unit at Fujitsu.

Fujitsu selected AWS to build its data use solution. In its comparison of major cloud services, it focused on AWS Lake Formation for its orchestration functions.

“We focused on data security. No other company offered a service like AWS Lake Formation with access control authority management and monitoring functions, which was the deciding factor in our selection,” says Doi.

The OneData project began in July 2021, and by April 2022, the data utilization platform was completed and available in Japan. The company started small with departments such as marketing and internal audit, which prioritize data-driven decision-making.

The architecture is based on serverless and managed services and consists primarily of AWS for data collection, processing, analytics, orchestration, data lake, and consumption tools. Infrastructure as code is being developed to automate service changes and payouts to users in anticipation of global expansion.   

While building the platform, the company received advice from AWS Professional Services about the architectural configuration, such as how to use AWS Lake Formation and security.

“OneData would require many systems to be linked in order to deploy globally and be used by approximately 124,000 of all employees,” says Doi. “However, the company had limited in-house AWS expertise and insufficient global deployment experience, so it decided to turn to AWS Professional Services. Even after the release of OneData, we continue to receive ongoing support in the areas of user training and usage support while also promoting internal development.”

As of May 2023, the number of departments using the data utilization platform has increased to approximately 140, and the number of users has reached approximately 27,000. The number of data linkage systems has expanded significantly to around 40, the number of dashboards to around 250, and the number of data catalogs to around 250. The project team, led by the DAC, has persistently conducted educational activities to increase the number of users and has promoted adoption by showcasing successful case studies on the portal site. As a result, change management in the company is progressing, and each department is becoming more active in using data.

“In the fiscal year of 2022 alone, the company received more than 100 inquiries about using data and business intelligence tools, and awareness in the field is steadily increasing,” says Ikeda. “The challenge for the future is to provide opportunities for users to acquire skills that help them to use data more freely so that each department can work on data use in a self-directed and agile manner while aligning with the company-wide data-driven strategy.” 

There are many use cases, including sales pipeline management in the sales department, resource allocation of engineers in the system integration department, and optimization of maintenance parts allocation in the hardware maintenance department, all of which contribute to operational efficiency. The management of the global sales pipeline is one of the most obvious and significant results. The company released the service on OneData in 3 months and shortened the data updates from monthly to daily. On site, the company looks at the data and implements effective management for the key accounts.

“Tracking pipeline updates daily speeds up the decision-making process and makes it easier to take countermeasures,” says Ikeda. “The benefits of central reporting and a consistent view across the four global regions are significant, and we are shifting to data-driven, proactive decision-making and action.”

Going forward, the company plans to accelerate global expansion while addressing the specific needs of overseas regions, such as GDPR compliance, to create an environment where all 124,000 Fujitsu employees can use data. As for OneData, the company plans to use Amazon DataZone, a new data management service from AWS, to make the data more accessible and to promote data use and self-service across organizational boundaries. The company is also looking ahead to advanced data use for forecasting with artificial intelligence and machine learning and the adoption of Amazon SageMaker Studio.

“We expect AWS to have the support capabilities for global expansion as well as the scalability and stability to manage and analyze all of our data,” says Aoyagi. “Expanding partnerships is also an important factor for Fujitsu, and we will continue to strengthen connectivity with other companies’ services.”