Hitachi Astemo was established in January 2021 through the management integration of Keihin Corporation, Showa Corporation, and Nisshin Kogyo Corporation, formerly Hitachi Automotive Systems Corporation, which was spun off from Hitachi, Ltd. in 2009. With the goal of creating world-leading mobility solutions in the hot area of CASE, we provide technologies and products related to powertrain, chassis, and advanced driver assistance systems domestically and internationally.

Hitachi Astemo, created by the merger of four companies, is a global mega supplier with approximately 90,000 employees in 27 countries around the world. Amidst the recent transformation of the automobile and motorcycle industry, society's demand for mobility and major changes in consumers' shopping activities require a variety of advanced technologies and innovative services, and digital business innovation is an essential requirement. In addition, due to the size of the combined organization, Hitachi Astemo's IT integration is also very large. The company plans to further strengthen its technology and organization both domestically and internationally, and to reform its business portfolio into a modern, more competitive one.

“IT reform is an extremely important factor in strengthening competitiveness. One is to make significant cost reductions to generate resources to strengthen the portfolio. The other is to develop new capabilities through digital transformation (DX). In addition to achieving these goals, it was essential to move to the cloud, a low-cost, highly scalable and fast IT infrastructure, as the foundation for promoting IT standardization that supports multiple global sites and businesses," said Mr. Hiroyuki Egota, Director, Infrastructure & Platform Management Department, Information Systems Management Division, Hitachi Astemo. Mr. Hiroyuki Egota, Director, Infrastructure & Platform Management Department, Information Systems Management Division, Hitachi Astemo.

Hitachi Astemo's first task was to move its PLM system, a key component of design and manufacturing, to the cloud. Traditional PLM systems are on-premises, highly vendor dependent, and cost of ownership has been an issue. In addition, the hardware was nearing the end of its maintenance period, and the decision was made to migrate to the cloud as a first step.
This initiative also included a simultaneous reform of the IT organization and human resources. We worked to improve our vendor-dependent structure and modernize our IT infrastructure to become a team that can contribute to the business as a Center of Excellence (CoE) for advanced IT technologies. For this, they chose AWS and AWS Professional Services.

"AWS, the world leader in cloud computing, has a wealth of information and a proven track record so you can use it with confidence. On the other hand, at the time, we were in a situation where we were just starting to learn about the cloud and AWS in earnest. We decided to use AWS Professional Services to quickly gain the right knowledge and experience. "The company's IT services are now available to all customers," recalls Ichiro Omata, Director of JP Region's IT Services Division, Information Systems Management Group. "The goal was to receive support as a "student teacher" rather than as a customer and vendor, someone to consult when needed," said Mr. Egota.

Hitachi Astemo undertook AWS training as Step 0 to increase its knowledge and skills. Basic training sessions were attended by user departments to deepen the company-wide understanding of AWS, while specialized training was used for selected teams to deepen their knowledge. Step 1, which focused on information gathering and analysis, was performed with the help of AWS solution architects to investigate the black box system, and Step 2 was used to design and build the core components.

"The problem was data migration, and we decided that CloudEndure Migration would make that easy, fast, and inexpensive. As for our concerns about the packaged software, we were able to confirm in advance that the migration could be completed without any problems, and we were able to begin the migration with peace of mind. The vendor representative was also present during the process and was amazed that the migration went off without a hitch. As a result, we were able to migrate 96 hosts and 26 applications in four months, including preparation," said Mr. Tsunemigi Suzuki, Director of the Management Systems Division, Information Systems Headquarters.

The PLM system migrated to AWS continues to run smoothly, with approximately 9,000 employees using the system for their work. As a result of the migration, data center, hardware and vendor support costs were significantly reduced, and operating costs were cut by approximately one-fifth. We use Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Systems Manager for operational tasks such as resource monitoring and fault detection and investigation, and we are also working on development to automate operational monitoring.

Mr. Makoto Taguchi, Senior Manager, Design Application 1 Section, JP Region IT Services Management Department, Information Systems Management Division, said, "During the migration, we faced a situation where we could not perform the migration due to insufficient instance performance, but by changing the instance type, we were able to quickly remedy the situation. Traditional on-premises systems tend to be over-specified and cannot eliminate vendor lock-in. The appeal of the cloud is that you can start small and make improvements immediately if there are shortcomings or dissatisfaction," he says.
Hitachi Astemo's enterprise-wide cloud computing project is ongoing, and the company is working to move its ERP and IoT infrastructures to AWS. In addition, a new AWS conversion project is underway in the design support area. More and more business units are coming to us for advice," says Mr. Omata. The company intends to support as much as possible, including existing on-premises systems, and to expand the use of SaaS and managed services in the right places and at the right time, rather than simply moving to the cloud.

Mr. Egota, who led the project, credits AWS's friendly support for allowing him to reform the organization, culture, and development methods as the biggest benefit. Because AWS allows us to try things out on our own, we were able to naturally transform into a new team that could learn and improve regardless of their position.
"As we continue to expand our business globally, we intend to leverage IT from a broad perspective. We focus on services as diverse as AWS DirectConnect and AWS IoT. We will use best practices from around the world as a reference," said Mr. Egota.

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