Section 1.14. ESA in action: Mitsui

1.14. ESA in action: Mitsui

Mitsui is an excellent example of a company that is putting ESA to work to integrate its operation based on a strategic look at key business processes. Mitsui is one of Japan's largest general trading companies, with more than 700 consolidated subsidiaries, 177 offices worldwide, and a global workforce of more than 38,000 employees. The company focuses on the trading of metals, machinery, chemicals, energy, and consumer goods, and the scope of its operations contains everything from domestic sales in Japan to import/export to offshore trading. Mitsui's strategic goal, set in 2000, is to become "the world's strongest general trading company." But rapid globalizationalong with the challenges of market expansion, fierce competition, and the rising volume of data that comes with itforced Mitsui to make important changes in its corporate structure.

To this end, the company embarked on a massive business reform and integration effort designed to streamline companywide business processes and consolidate the more than 400 individual systems comprising the supporting IT infrastructure. Mitsui's overarching goal was to replace the individual and diffuse efforts of its subsidiaries with a more integrated and centralized model aimed at optimizing, standardizing, and visualizing the operational processes the Mitsui Group had in common.

Begun in earnest in 2001, the first stages of the company's "business reform project" required four years and 670 project members working around the clock, to identify and redesign core business processes. The project team set four overarching goals for their effort:

• Redesign of the operational processes from the viewpoint of overall optimization

• Support of the redesigned operational processes through use of the latest systems

• Reform of the organization into a shared service center

• Creation of a mechanism for sharing knowledge

With those goals in mind, the team set four corresponding midterm objectives:

• Creation of sales opportunity windows

• Prompt provision of management information

• Small corporate divisions made by professionals

• Thorough digitization

Both the policies and the objectives were at the top of the development team's mind when it finally came time to implement what became known as the MICAN (short for the slogan "Mitsui I can!") Process and the MICAN System, which were composed of three types of reform. Organizational reform was enabled by the Shared Service Center model adopted by the project team. Process reform was introduced using the Process System Integrity (PSI) model based on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. And the underlying IT reform was realized by the adoption of ESA and was based on SAP NetWeaverspecifically, its SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) and SAP EP components, with SAP R/3 as the base ERP application.

Mitsui built the MICAN System using SAP NetWeaver as the platform, with SAP R/3 and SAP BW comprising a layer of functionality immediately below. After mapping Mitsui's diverse IT landscape to the streamlined business processes identified in the MICAN Process, approximately 400 commonly used pieces of IT functionality were redesigned as reusable web services, of which 100 to 150 appeared in nearly every cross-company process. A rudimentary Enterprise Services Repository was created, as each enterprise service was assigned an ID number and was registered in a database to aid in the easy visualization of operational processes.

Business processes that were once unique to individual Mitsui subsidiaries have since been integrated and centralized, vastly improving the speed and integrity of data as it flows across the combined enterprise. To make these redesigned processes visible to Mitsui's managers, the project team implemented SAP EP to create a portal that would unify them within a single UI. The finished portal serves approximately 9,000 users via a single-sign-on secured site, with role-based profiles providing the appropriate level of functionality and data to any given user.

Looking toward the future, Mitsui intends to keep the MICAN Process and the MICAN System at the heart of its continuous efforts to streamline its efforts in Japan while rolling the system out to its overseas subsidiaries and affiliates over the next few years.