A membership site that provides information to global distributors and customers

Yokogawa Electric Corporation Corporation (hereafter, Yokogawa Electric Corporation) is promoting the globalization of its business, with a global market share in the field of control and operation monitoring systems for factories and plant facilities in the petrochemical, steel, paper, food, and pharmaceutical industries. started with the opening of the North American sales office in 1957, and since then has been developing overseas bases in Singapore, the Netherlands, Brazil, China and India. Aiming to be the global No. 1 in the control business, the company has increased its overseas sales ratio to nearly 70% by transferring headquarters functions overseas and increasing the overseas ratio of production and procurement. The company's products and solutions are supplied all over the world in cooperation with its extensive overseas network.

In January 2015, we launched a product information site for members (hereafter referred to as the member site) using Amazon Web Service (AWS) to provide information to sales companies and customers of Yokogawa Electric Corporation products. We are starting to provide it.

The machine data analysis platform ``Splunk Enterprise'' (hereinafter referred to as Splunk) proposed by Macnica has been adopted as the web access analysis engine that is the core of this membership site. In addition to its extensive track record of use on AWS overseas, it was praised for its ability to centralize a variety of data in different formats, its advanced internal search functionality, and its dashboard functionality with excellent operability.

Visualize customer behavior on membership sites and create new business opportunities

Mr. Yamashita of the YGSP Department of Yokogawa Electric Corporation Corporation's Business Management Headquarters explains the main purpose of the membership site as follows. One is sales support in the global market. "We will integrate the information sites that have been set up for each product into one to make it easier for customers to obtain information and support our overseas sales representatives in efficiently conducting sales activities in a wide area."

Membership sites are divided into categories such as "services," "marketing," and "sales," and information is provided. “When we analyzed web access with Splunk, we found that there were many accesses not only from the countries and regions where we were based, but also from areas that we had not been able to reach before. That's a big point," says Yamashita.

In addition, with Macnica 's implementation support, we have improved Splunk's dashboard to make it easier to see, such as by making it possible to visually see how many accesses have occurred in which countries on a world map.

The second is to provide information on old products purchased by customers. Yokogawa Electric Corporation 's control system products have a long service life, and it is not uncommon for products to operate for 10 to 15 years, so data sheets and manuals for older products that are no longer posted on the official website can be easily obtained from the web. I made it In the past, it was difficult to obtain information on old products without individual support from sales and support, so the purpose was to compensate for this.

The third step is to identify hidden member needs. The member site already uses PingFederate, a single sign-on (SSO) software that uses ID federation provided separately by Macnica, to link member IDs with search engines from other companies. Furthermore, by using Splunk, it is now possible to link and visualize users who log in to membership sites and how they behave on other companies' search engine sites, allowing us to uncover member needs and develop alternative products. Contributed to creating new business opportunities by making proposals and introducing new products.

Mr. Yamashita said, ``As globalization has progressed, it has become difficult for sales to reach out to users. I said. If you are tracking by serial number and viewing information on an old product, it is likely that you want to replace it or have a problem, so it was necessary for the manufacturer to step up and provide the necessary information.

A joint project with more than 10 companies, built in just half a year centered on Splunk

By using Splunk for the membership site, it became possible to collect the huge amount of logs generated from "Amazon CloudFront" and "EC2" on AWS to "Amazon S3" and analyze them freely with Splunk. This has made it possible to discover specific customer requirements and provide useful information feedback for the sales of global partner companies. In addition, Splunk's flexible collaboration function made it possible to quickly build a system in just half a year and make analysis possible, even though it was a large-scale joint construction project in which more than 10 vendors' products were linked in a complicated manner. It is said that this is the result of the high performance and the diversity of data transfer.

Mr. Yoshida of the YGSP Department of Yokogawa Electric Corporation Corporation's Business Administration Headquarters says that at first Splunk thought that it would be good if the data of the member site and the core system could be linked. “By linking logs, we were able to visualize customer behavior, and when we were able to grasp in a short period of time who in which company needed what, I felt that the data was just like a treasure.”

Mr. Yoshida says that after introducing Splunk, he realized that he could handle big data more than he expected, and that motivated him to do bottom-up aggregation and analysis one after another.

On the other hand, Mr. Yamashita points out the possibility of KPI measurement in membership site investment by collecting data in Splunk. “After building a membership site, it is important to connect it to sales activities. Splunk makes it possible to understand the effectiveness of the membership site for customers, and if customer satisfaction can be improved, the investment effect can be visualized. If you are going to build a site, it would be more effective to introduce Splunk as well." (Mr. Yamashita)

Extended use of Splunk for member site cyber security measures

While analyzing web server logs using Splunk, Yokogawa Electric Corporation was able to discover accesses by various bots, login errors, and 404 errors (page does not exist). Therefore, in the future, by importing the security logs of "Imperva SecureSphere", a WAF provided by Macnica on the AWS cloud for member sites, into Splunk and performing a correlation analysis, we will be able to prevent cyber security incidents such as attacks on member sites and unauthorized logins. We are also considering conducting security analysis up to and including investigation after the incident occurs.

"With Macnica 's implementation support service, the project progressed successfully thanks to the staff in charge patiently listening to the Company to understand what we needed and working with us on how to use it," says Yoshida. I rate it highly. In order to live up to these expectations, Macnica will continue to generously provide its skills to help Yokogawa Electric Corporation evolve as it aims to become a solution service company.

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