Constructing a Digital Management Platform
To contribute to the expansion of social innovation businesses and to the realization of digital management, we aim to build a digital management platform that will be shared throughout the Hitachi Group.
Even as we expand our company scope and portfolio, this shared platform will provide information for growth and keep costs down.
We are building a CRM platform to consolidate and visualize data about markets, customers, and projects globally, as well as to contribute to enhanced information-provision and sales activities in the marketing departments at all Hitachi companies.
By creating chunks of data that help us to comprehensively visualize the relationship between the Hitachi Group and our customers, we will strengthen marketing and sales activities through the entire Group.
The Group-wide CRM platform was released in Japan in August 2022 and released overseas in January 2023; however, it was rolled out to some overseas Hitachi Group companies in advance. The plan is to fully roll this out to all companies between FY (fiscal year) 2023 and FY 2025.
To strengthen our marketing and sales activities, we need to make the state of business at all companies visible in real time, as well as to gather and store data that is the same level of quality globally. We can then share this data throughout the Hitachi Group to make information such as the following visible: customer contact histories, order data, negotiation pipelines, competitor data, and macro market data.
We will provide data-analysis functionality to enable sophisticated use of the consolidated data. Previously, searches were limited to the order and procurement records of individual BUs#3 or Hitachi Group companies, and their industry, region, customers, etc. The Group-wide CRM infrastructure combines external information (such as market size and growth rates) with internal information (such as orders, sales amount, and gross profits), enabling exploration from multiple perspectives.
By assigning priorities to different opportunities and visualizing the status of projects, we will support cross-sales expansion and the creation of the social innovation businesses across multiple sectors. By exploring “white space” (unmet customer needs) through analysis of internal and external information, we can make previously invisible information visible and support enhancements to proposal content through order analysis and sharing of customer information. In addition, by using consolidated customer-relevant data and case examples, we can reduce the level of effort required to prepare proposals. This will lead to stronger and more efficient sales activities, while also enabling the Hitachi Group to make proposals to customers that maximize the value of the Hitachi Group.
