Hitachi Transport System, Ltd.

Hitachi Transport System, Ltd. helps companies optimize their supply chains through its three core businesses: 3PL (system logistics), heavy machinery and engineering, and freight forwarding. Currently, while strengthening our core business, we are promoting smart logistics (automation/labor saving) to put advanced technologies such as IoT, AI, and robotics into practical use in the logistics field.

The company began its transition to cloud computing in 2014, "way behind other companies," recalls Mr. Hajime Tashiro, deputy general manager of the IT Strategy Division's Digital Business Promotion Department. At the time, the market structure was changing due to the rise of e-commerce and population decline, and shippers were becoming increasingly global. The company has also clearly established a business strategy with a global mindset, and it was imperative that the IT organization be strengthened and adapted to a global environment.

At the time, the company was deploying its Global Warehouse Management System (GWMS), an inventory management system used in 10 countries around the world, from an on-premises environment in Japan and was also building a DR environment in Japan. However, in preparation for the risk of natural disasters and other events that could disrupt shipments to overseas locations, the company decided to review the locations of system provision in three regions (USA, Asia, and China). We also wanted to reduce costs compared to the existing cost of on-premises servers. After further consideration, including the requirements of a three-pole launch within 1.5 years and BtoB-level service quality, the decision was made to go with AWS. At the time, AWS was the only cloud service that met all of our needs," said Mr. Tashiro.

Although Hitachi Transport System Software, a Hitachi Transport System Group company, was contracted to build the AWS environment, engineers said "we cannot be responsible for whether the application will really work," and there was a strong opinion within Hitachi Transport System that "mission-critical systems such as SAP could not be loaded on the system. “

What we worked on was changing the mindset of our engineers. Mr. Yuichiro Yoshida, General Manager of Hitachi Transport System Software's ICT Solutions Division, said, "When we took a strong stance that if we didn't do AWS ourselves, we would use another company, we developed a sense of urgency that if we eventually did it, we would have to be involved from the beginning or we would have a hard time maintaining it later, and if cloud computing became the mainstream, other jobs would also decrease. We felt a sense of urgency that if cloud computing became mainstream, we would lose other jobs. To shift to a positive mindset, we also devised a way to replace difficult AWS-specific words with technologies/words that the engineers knew.

As we moved from the traditional "configuration that prevents failures" to "configuration that is safe even if failures occur" and removed the fear of failures occurring, people started to say, "If you know virtualization technology, you can handle it.” When the customer said it would be inconvenient to have the actual equipment in front of them, they were convinced that AWS, where almost everything can be done from the management console, was more convenient than an on-premises environment.

“When we actually tried it, our engineers began to tell us that their knowledge of virtualization was useful, that there were no problems, that it was convenient to operate from anywhere, and that it was easy not to worry about hardware failures," Mr. Yoshida said.