Hitachi High-Tech: Mastering side-by-side development techniques to innovate in a more agile and future-ready way
Explore Hitachi High-Tech’s journey with SAP
Hitachi High-Tech Corporation replaced its highly customized multinational business landscape by investing in SAP S/4HANA Cloud in a two-tier public and private cloud model. With a fit-to-standard ethos, the company can now focus on supporting business innovation across its subsidiaries using a side-by-side approach on SAP Business Technology Platform.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| High tech | Tokyo, Japan | 12,717 employees |
reduction in customization footprint.
faster handling of solution updates.
of on-site maintenance requirements eliminated.
General Manager, Digital Transformation Business Group, Hitachi High-Tech Corporation
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| High tech | Tokyo, Japan | 12,717 employees |
reduction in customization footprint.
faster handling of solution updates.
of on-site maintenance requirements eliminated.
General Manager, Digital Transformation Business Group, Hitachi High-Tech Corporation
Moving to next-generation ERP in the cloud to be future-ready and agile
Hitachi High-Tech Corporation is committed to simplifying its customers’ high-tech processes and resolving various social issues using the three core technologies of measurement, analysis, and reasoning. The company’s activities encompass different verticals, including the manufacture and sales of clinical analyzers, biotechnology products, analytical instruments, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and analysis equipment. It also provides high-value-added solutions in the fields of social and industrial infrastructures and mobility.
Since the 1990s, the SAP ERP application formed the backbone of its operations for both domestic and international business. Over time, Hitachi High-Tech had accumulated more than 9,000 customizations, hindering its ability to adapt quickly to variable business conditions.
Hitachi High-Tech envisioned reshaping its operations to form an ideal management model, rather than improving its current state, committing to investing in next-generation ERP to create future-ready business operations. The company also launched a business transformation project called Digital Experience (DX)-Pro, allowing it to focus on its true purpose of innovation powered by the right technology.
By embracing the change, Hitachi High-Tech not only moved from a legacy approach but also took a bold step to become an intelligent enterprise.
Manager Corporate DX Department, Digital Transformation Business Group, Hitachi High-Tech Corporation
Taking advantage of a two-tier ERP model and side-by-side development
To create world-class business operations in the cloud, Hitachi High-Tech invested in SAP S/4HANA Cloud and adopted a two-tier model, illustrated in the figure below. Taking advantage of development flexibility, the company deployed SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition for its headquarters and group companies in Japan and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition for its overseas sales offices.
The adoption of SAP S/4HANA Cloud allows Hitachi High-Tech to take advantage of the functionality offered by SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) for application development, data management, automation, integration, analytics, and AI.
The new two-tiered architecture uses SAP BTP as a hub and connects SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the SAP Analytics Cloud solution, and the SAP BW/4HANA solution deployed in Japan and overseas. It also links to various subsystems, such as its customer relationship management application, manufacturing execution system, warehouse management system, and electronic data interchange.
Leveraging side-by-side extensibility on SAP BTP enables Hitachi High-Tech to decouple essential development from the core system of record, allowing extensions to be developed without changing standard code. In this way, the company has developed 98 required extensions for mass registrations, workflows, and reports, as well as batch processing and interfaces for electronic data interchange and subsystem linkage for consolidation and bank connectivity. This helped Hitachi High-Tech operate at pace where innovation matched the ever-changing market conditions and technologies.
Manager Corporate DX Department, Digital Transformation Business Group, Hitachi High-Tech Corporation
Adopting a fit-to-standard approach for future flexibility and speed
To ready its business operations for the future and take full advantage of the best-practice processes embedded in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Hitachi High-Tech resisted modifying the solution architecture to meet its requirements. Instead, the company redefined processes to fit the standard.
Where extensions were considered essential, the company chose the disciplined approach of developing side-by-side extensions on SAP BTP. By leveraging the application development and automation capabilities of SAP BTP, the company developed customizations side by side as opposed to altering standard code. This minimizes modifications to the system architecture, safeguarding operational stability and reliability, and enables the agility needed to innovate at market speed. In addition, with minimal changes to the standard code, the company has more immediate access to improved functionality, with faster upgrade cycles. This led to the reuse of developments across its two-tier private and public cloud implementations and quicker troubleshooting in the event of upgrade issues.
Commenting on its new fit-to-standard approach, Yuri Yasuda, manager of the corporate DX department of the digital transformation business group at Hitachi High-Tech, explains, “With our new fit-to-standard policy, we pursue only essential customizations and develop these on SAP BTP. Consequently, our customization footprint shrank from over 9,000 extensions to just 22. Even when you include the APIs and custom core data services we developed on SAP S/4HANA Cloud for linking to external systems, there are fewer than 600 customizations in total.”
Beyond serving as a hub and using SAP Integration Suite to connect services, applications, events, and data, SAP BTP provided extensibility and personalization services to improve processes and experiences. Workflow management and robotic process automation capabilities enabled cross-system workflows and automated task execution, such as Microsoft Excel file uploads. And SAP Fiori apps helped ensure a consistent user experience across applications and intuitive self-service access to processes and reports.
General Manager, Digital Transformation Business Group, Hitachi High-Tech Corporation
Continuing to master new development methods for competitive agility
Thanks to its fit-to-standard approach and two-tier adoption of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, Hitachi High-Tech leverages the latest technology updates. This allows the company to take advantage of the emerging capabilities and collaborate with business ecosystems, quickly providing users with the latest features and functionality to respond to market changes.
The company plans to develop a variety of innovations on SAP BTP. One project currently underway expands on previous experiences with robotic process automation and aims to automate data entry using the SAP Build Process Automation solution. Another project leverages machine learning to predict financial results. Hitachi High-Tech also aims to enhance its development and process automation capability by establishing a monitoring environment that oversees the entire system while exploring the benefits of low-code development using SAP Build solutions.