How Panasonic Cleared Taking Care of Hardware, Legal Changes and Customs Software Release Planning

Panasonic Corporation is one of the largest electronic product manufacturers in the world, comprised of over 634 companies.

It manufactures and markets a wide range of products under the Panasonic brand to enhance and enrich lifestyles all around the globe. Panasonic has 330,767 employees and a turnover of 72 billion Euros. Panasonic Europe, with more than 10,000 employees is the regional organization of the Panasonic Corporation.

Nearly 10 years of collaboration between MIC and Panasonic Europe have led to one of the most extensive customer in-house implementations among MIC’s customer base. Each year new solutions and customer specific developments have been added and rolled out into additional countries, leading to a multi-country customs platform for Panasonic’s European businesses.

“First analysis showed that it was not possible to move forward with the existing IT system environment” Petra Herrmann, General Manager - European Customs Compliance at Panasonic Europe Ltd.

Petra Herrmann, General Manager - European Customs Compliance at Panasonic Europe Ltd., says, “In 2010, a project to implement a new logistics solution was started. Related to this project, a European warehouse consolidation took place and in addition a new distribution center should be set up in the Czech Republic with the need to report customs declarations to the national customs authorities. So far, we had no Czech customs software solution in place and have been forced to investigate on this.”

“First analysis showed that it was not possible to move forward with the existing IT system environment: it was not Unicode enabled which is absolutely required when using different character sets and it was not web enabled but accessible only via a Citrix-Server.”

“The question was: Should we invest into a new solution or into the existing one causing costs related to the upgrading of the outdated Citrix server, regularly facing costs for installing software updates across 3 IT environments, taking care of legal changes and many more? This was the chance for a turnaround in our customs solution strategy!”

An intensive evaluation process started ...