Strategy for Integrating Diverse Customer Touchpoints

SHIMOJIMA Co., Ltd.

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Founded over a century ago, Shimojima is a long-established company in the packaging industry and is an integrated business, conducting product planning, manufacturing and wholesale, store operations and direct online sales. Its customers are diverse, ranging from consumers to corporations, and its sales channels are varied. The company needed to manage its various customer touchpoints effectively and organically, so it has undertaken a shift toward omnichannel.

Mission-critical priority

Shimojima is undertaking an omnichannel strategy to expand its sales channels and is exploring ways to create new business through organic customer management via data integration and through digital transformation.

  • In 2018, Shimojima revamped its online store and integrated customer data from its online and brick-and-mortar operations.
  • Utilizing integrated customer data, it built a framework to develop from individual customers to corporate business.

Shimojima expected its product lineup to further expand, so it faced the challenge of designing an optimized supply chain system, such as using electronic data interchange (EDI) and API to integrate data, including data from its suppliers.

In addition, Shimojima needed to raise its profit margin by optimizing processes from manufacturing to wholesale and retail, so it had to remake and deploy a variety of in-house systems to improve operational efficiency. 

How Gartner helped

Gartner provided the following actionable, objective insights and expert guidance on:

  • Specific issues from inquiries with Gartner experts and the Gartner executive partner:
    • Methods and planning for the migration of the mission-critical systems
    • Vendors and solutions to help Shimojima choose the best fit from among the large number of solutions and services on the market
    • Ideas and targets when creating a mid- to long-term strategy, including points of offense and defense and generation of synergy with subsidiaries
  • Fairness of vendor pricing and important points to consider by reviewing quotes from vendors (Gartner BuySmart™)

Business impact

With the support of Gartner:

  • Shimojima was able to integrate data from its online and brick-and-mortar stores and wholesale operations by implementing an omnichannel strategy, and increase effective sales activities; it has plans to widen its scope to integrate corporate business and its supply chain
  • Shimojima remade and deployed the following systems to improve the efficiency of business operations and reduce costs:
    • Migrated the mission-critical systems
    • Moved EDI system to the cloud
    • Introduced robotic process automation, artificial intelligence/optical character recognition and chatbot
    • Deployed an API solution for the integration with other systems
  • Shimojima was able to reduce costs by an expected 5% to 10% from the original quotes using the fairness of pricing analysis during the migration of its mission-critical systems, now in the final stage

Industry:
Wholesale

Revenue:
US$423 million (consolidated, in FY ending March 2021)

Employees:
807 (consolidated, as of March 31, 2021)

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Gartner experts are knowledgeable in the latest market trends, including new services and solutions, and they provide information carefully selected to meet our company’s needs, so we find their help invaluable. For example, we deployed an API integration solution based on information that would have been unobtainable without Gartner, and reaped great benefits in terms of both time and cost.

Yuichi Tanaka

General Manager of Information Systems Department, SHIMOJIMA Co., Ltd.

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