Company: Mitsubishi Polyester Film, Inc. (a unit of Mitsubishi Chemical Holding Co.)
Location: Greer, SC
Size of Company: (revenue or employees) over 500 employees
Business: Mitsubishi Polyester Film develops, manufactures, and markets polyethylene terephthalate-based polyester films that are used in a variety of applications, including packaging, labels and liners, lamination, window and solar products.
The Challenge: Until recently, Mitsubishi Polyester Film was saddled with a series of five major legacy systems that were internally developed over the past 10 to 20 years. Although the systems did an adequate job of running everything from order management, to plant floor scheduling and production, to warehouse and inventory management, increasingly the legacy systems were creating problems for the company. IT workers who knew the systems and were able to keep them running were beginning to consider retirement, making it more and more difficult for Mitsubishi Polyester Film to maintain and enhance the systems.
At the same time, because the legacy systems had never been completely integrated, it was difficult to reduce data errors caused by rekeying and to extract timely information from the systems. Data needed from manufacturing process systems has to re rekeyed into the business applications. Conversely, data from the business applications had to be rekeyed for operation of the material handling systems and equipment. This resulted in errors and inefficiencies.
The Solution: Mitsubishi Polyester Film decided to replace all of the legacy systems with new, integrated systems developed using Microsoft’s .NET framework. The goal was to create an integrated set of applications that would be more flexible, allowing the company to respond more easily to changes in the business while also affording easier access to real-time shop floor information and eliminating data re-entry errors.
The company opted for another internally developed suite of systems because it determined that any off-the-shelf ERP system would need to be extensively modified to meet the company’s needs.
“In the end, we decided the .NET option would be more cost-effective,” says Nancy Laye, Mitsubishi Polyester Film’s IT director.
Because Mitsubishi Polyester Film did not have adequate .NET technical expertise in-house, the company hired a professional services provider, Cognizant Technology Solutions, to develop, maintain, and support the new applications. By using a third-party service provider, Laye says, Mitsubishi Polyester Film hopes to gain flexibility in applying IT resources to supporting the applications.