Fujitsu’s PaaS will help Panasonic’s Supply Chain Management
Fujitsu announced the development of a new system, utilising the Fujitsu Data Intelligence PaaS (Procurement-as-a-service), an operational platform under Fujitsu Uvance.
This system harnesses the power of data and AI to enhance the resilience of supply chain management for Panasonic Electric Works Company (Panasonic EW), a division of Panasonic Corporation. The full-scale implementation of this system at Panasonic EW began in April 2024.
The new system
This platform will integrate large amounts of data within more than 3,000 sites, including domestic and overseas suppliers and factories, across the entire organisation to support decision-making for business continuity.
Panasonic EW, which handles electrical construction materials, manages tens of thousands of products, parts and other information for each department, division and location separately, using different formats of data. With the new system, it will manage the data integration of 20 existing systems, including production, sales, inventory and parts procurement.
It will also identify and visualise parts with more than 200,000 parts in stock. This will result in increased optimisation of the PSI (Production, Sales and Inventory) plan and parts procurement plans at a company-wide level. As well as leveraging the use of AI to implement accurate demand forecasting models based on data.
Panasonic EW enables dynamic and resilient supply chain management by using data to quickly respond to disaster or change in the business landscape by using AI to predict the uncertain outcomes to make corrective decisions.
What the new system will bring
Panasonic EW will utilise Fujitsu’s PaaS to integrate, store and visualise data and develop an all-in-one business system. With this, it has been able to gain control of PSI information, parts procurement plans and inventory status at each site at the company-wide level.
This has improved efficiency promoting operations across divisions and achieving inventory levelling by adjusting inventory among sites and suppressing orders.
In addition, this new system will give insight on each order during natural disasters, as well as the impact of profit and loss on the entire business, ultimately leading to supporting decision-making for maintaining production and supply systems.
By leveraging the PaaS’s seamless data integration capabilities, Panasonic EW successfully identified and visualised parts in its inventory of more than 200,000 parts in as little as two weeks, without modifying existing systems.
Fujitsu’s commitment to the sustainable development goals
Fujitsu has outlined its commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015 to represent a set of common goals to be achieved worldwide by 2030.
In a message from the CEO on the company’s website, outlining sustainability, Takahito Tokita, CEO of Fujitsu, said: “The Fujitsu Group states Our Purpose, which is to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation.
“To achieve Our Purpose, in May 2023, we defined our Materiality where sustainability is the core focus of business growth. The essential contributions we must make were identified as: solving global environmental issues, developing a digital society and improving people's well-being.”
AI creating high precision demand forecast
Panasonic EW utilised Fujitsu Kozuchi AutoML, Fujitsu’s AI service that can generate highly accurate machine learning models in a short period of time to generate 300 predictive models.
This is based on sales results of key components over the last five years from information integrated into the database. This will enable highly accurate PSI planning for each component category.
Plans for the future
As we move toward 2030, where the report expects the labour shortage to become more apparent due to the rapid decline in the working-age population in Japan, Fujitsu will support Panasonic EW in building a sustainable and resilient supply chain system and promote operational reforms to achieve high productivity that will allow them to complete similar tasks with 50% of their current man hours.
Under Fujitsu Uvance, Fujitsu will contribute to the realisation of a sustainable world by providing a comprehensive view of the entire supply chain through Digital Shifts initiatives that utilise data and technology to help companies strengthen their resilience and respond to environmental and societal issues.
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