By leveraging the power of centralized, non-siloed data, the firm is increasing productivity and agility while modernizing for the data age

Shimizu Corporation, a family business involved in architectural, civil engineering and general contracting firm since the 1800s, has been widely recognized as one of the top five contractors in Japan, and among the top 20 in the world.

In its ongoing development efforts to modernize its data infrastructure, increase data utilization company-wide, and ultimately improve operational efficiency and agility, the firm recently adopted a third-party data management platform after a two-month proof-of-concept.

The migration took three months, but important data is now freed from past silos. The firm’s departments can share data at the user (employee) level, while being able to improve data quality, freshness, standardization, and governance. Specifically:

  • Users can have instant access to all data, from within a unified interface.
  • The modernized data infrastructure is easy for users to understand. According to Yoshitaka Okazaki, a group leader in the firm’s Data Management Group, the platform has “made it easy for me to label data entities with sensible names, and this makes it easier for users to find the data they need.”
  • Lead times for data-centric projects are reduced, which has also saved costs.
  • Standardized reporting now reduces the burden on the head office and branch offices, and in-house development of reports is saving substantial amounts of funds that would have been spent on vendor services.
  • The data management platform also offers low-code/no-code development capabilities that enable the firm’s citizen developers to create their own applications, thereby reducing the burden on the digital strategy team.

In future, the firm plans to extend its usage of the Denodo Platform to not only to make maintenance and construction data available as text, but also as images and in other formats. This will constitute 100% use of data on the platform, according to the firm’s digital strategy team.