Seminar Report
Three kintone and uSonar Users Present
Practical Examples of Operational Efficiency and Sales Transformation Revealed!

[Part 2] Practical Case Studies in Operational Efficiency and Sales Transformation

In the second part, Marute Otsuka Co., Ltd., Sakura Color Products Corp., and Kuze Co., Ltd. participated in a panel discussion to introduce their respective use cases combining kintone and uSonar services.

Speakers (from left):
Mr. Shin Sawada, DX Promotion Manager, Corporate Strategy Promotion Office, Kuze Co., Ltd.
Mr. Kengo Okada, Manager, Digital Strategy Section, Marketing Department and Web Sales Development Section, Sakura Color Products Corp.
Mr. Kentaro Ishii, Deputy General Manager, Systems Department, Administration Division, Marute Otsuka Co., Ltd.

Before Using uSonar

Marute Otsuka Co., Ltd. (Mr. Ishii): Previously, if the same customer went through different distributors (such as paint retailers), they were registered under different codes, making it impossible to determine if they were the same customer.
As a manufacturer of painting supplies like brushes and rollers, Marute Otsuka wholesales these products to distributors. However, the actual end users of the products are the painting contractors behind those distributors.
Therefore, we needed to accurately identify cases where different distributors were actually serving the same customer, and we are utilizing uSonar tools to solve this challenge.

Sakura Color Products Corp. (Mr. Okada): Due to distribution complexities, our system generated multiple customer management codes for the same retailer, which required significant manual effort to link. We had previously implemented a competitor's product, but we decided to use uSonar tools to resolve this issue.

Kuze Co., Ltd. (Mr. Sawada): When we first introduced SFA, employees were reluctant to input data due to the high workload. To dispel the image that this would increase their operational burden, we introduced uSonar tools to demonstrate that it provides sales representatives with a powerful tool that enhances convenience, which led to the successful adoption of case management.

Why We Adopted uSonar

Although the three companies operate in different industries and business models, they all cited the fact that codes are assigned at the business establishment level as a key reason for adoption.

Marute Otsuka Co., Ltd. (Mr. Ishii): I appreciated the comprehensive coverage from large corporations to individuals. The fact that LBC codes were assigned at the factory and business establishment level was the deciding factor.

Sakura Color Products Corp. (Mr. Okada): Our retailers include many sole proprietors, and we also maintain a master database of educational facilities like kindergartens as final delivery destinations. The fact that we achieved a 70% match rate with that information and could integrate with kintone on a daily basis was significant.

Kuze Co., Ltd. (Mr. Sawada): Many of our customers are sole proprietors, and we adopted the service after finding that 94% of our internal customer data matched the uSonar database. We had struggled for 20 years with issues like multiple customer codes for the same account and an inability to consolidate data, so being able to perform data cleansing was a major achievement.

Actual Results

Marute Otsuka Co., Ltd. (Mr. Ishii): By being able to manage painting companies as end users, we are now able to send direct mail to them. Since many painting companies share the same name, the ability to manage them accurately is a major achievement. We also use Live Access to identify companies that visit our website. Since we can link information captured by the business card management tool mSonar to kintone, we have made email distribution easier by integrating it with third-party email apps.

Sakura Color Products Corp. (Mr. Okada): We achieved unification of customer names and codes, allowing us to compress our data by approximately 40%. It has been a great help as we no longer need to perform the data cleansing and deduplication work that I previously had to do myself. We were also able to integrate customer records that had been siloed because they were managed by individuals, using kintone. Additionally, as a secondary effect of introducing uSonar tools, it became possible for headquarters staff to monitor the activities of individual stores. For example, interactions with headquarters staff of chain retailers and individual store staff were previously managed separately, but by utilizing the corporate LBC, we can now view them all at once.

Kuze Co., Ltd. (Mr. Sawada): Our employees use SideSonar (now PLANSonar) and kintone screens side-by-side. Because we link our existing customer data, we can visualize which hotels are already doing business with us and which are not, for example, in the case of a company operating multiple hotels, which helps in selecting targets for our approach. Also, a feature we find very helpful is that the address data linked to the LBC is categorized into fields such as prefecture and municipality. Thanks to this, we can now visualize logistics efficiency by viewing areas on a map.

The event then moved to a Q&A session where the speakers answered questions from the participants.
After the presentations, a networking reception was held where participants could talk to the speakers and interact with one another.
It became a very lively event, providing an opportunity for networking and information exchange that is difficult to achieve in the course of daily business or social relationships.