JFE Steel Corporation Digital Transformation Initiatives

About the Customer

JFE Steel Corporation manufactures and sells steel products. JFE Steel Corporation was formerly known as Kawasaki Steel Corporation and changed its name to JFE Steel Corporation in April 2003. The company was founded in 1950 and is based in Chiyoda-ku, Japan.  JFE Steel Corporation operates as a subsidiary of JFE Holdings, Inc.

Scope and Challenges

The steel industry, being highly asset-intensive, requires higher capacity fixed asset accounting. Going on a digital journey had goals in supporting global growth strategy, thus increasing participation by the global investor community. 

Increasing visibility across group subsidiaries was important, as they operate a business with functionally branched subsidiaries. They needed to look at the data in a horizontal skewer and communicate in the same manner for operating JFE Group.

The future project was designed to standardize and modernize the conventional business processes.

Outcome and Implications

They started to transform themselves in 2016 from a traditional manufacturing company to a more global and digitalized company in order to survive the competitive market, by using S/4HANA. 

The implementation enabled building up centralized business operations on S/4HANA foundation, within planned financial budget and original project schedule without any overruns; realizing a simple and single architecture/platform, which includes one consolidated server, unified storages, and highly optimized user management, which serves JFE Steel and all 80 subsidiaries.

The project went live in 2017 after 9 months of implementation and roll-out for 80 subsidiaries was achieved within 11 months.

Quotes

"This project makes it possible to standardize business processes and build the foundation of a global accounting system. SAP S/4HANA enables us to analyze the whole group’s business performance more efficiently and effectively.” - said Toshihiro Tanaka, Chief Financial Officer.