Founded in Japan, The Kaneka Group has also been operating in Malaysia for 20 years. With six companies and manufacturing facilities, it boasts the largest plant operations in Asia outside of Japan.

Chemical Manufacturing

Reinvent IT systems to streamline operations and improve productivity.

Rising commoditization in the chemical manufacturing industry has led to an accelerating demand for innovation in products, processes, and business models. Faced with an increasingly competitive climate, many corporations in the industry have been forced to look hard at reinventing their legacy infrastructures to cope with the rapid change, while facing pressures to keep operating costs low in the process. The Kaneka Malaysia Group was no exception.

However, getting buy-in from the parent organization for an entire IT overhaul would be no easy feat – Kaneka needed proof before committing time and resources to such a project. To address this, Kaneka worked with Nutanix’s IT partner Virtuosity Solutions to conduct an IT Technology Assessment study, including interviews with top management and systems engineers on the group’s operations and IT stress points.

The study revealed that Kaneka had a legacy 3-tier IT infrastructure comprised of inefficient and disparate systems that were expensive to maintain and difficult to scale up as IT requirements expanded. It also showed that Kaneka was not adequately protected against potential hardware or software crashes, system intrusions, or datacenter outages – a weakness that could severely impact the availability of Kaneka’s critical operations. Additionally, the disparate IT systems were not standardized in deployment and operations, curtailing manpower efficiency and inhibiting business growth.

It was clear that new technologies were needed in order to re-engineer Kaneka’s IT operation. “Our IT Assessment study allowed us to realize the value of IT infrastructure’s role in driving overall productivity, and that helped us to make the decision to overhaul our systems with Nutanix as one of the core technologies,” said Ehtesham Ihsan, Acting Head of IT Department, Kaneka.