Data-driven supply-and-demand planning helped Nissho break free from person-dependent processes while achieving both inventory reduction and stockout prevention.

Company Profile

• Industry: Trading company — automotive parts, electronic components, industrial materials
• Revenue: ¥50–100 billion
• Employees: 1,000–5,000

We spoke with four leaders at Nissho Corporation about why they adopted the SaaS-based SCM system PlanNEL, what they set out to achieve, and how their operations have changed since: Keisuke Hizawa, Director and Head of the Management Infrastructure Division; Emiko Uchida, Executive Officer and General Manager of the Business Administration Department; Shinji Tsujita, Deputy General Manager of the Logistics Planning Department within the Business Administration Department; and Akira Tanaka of the same Logistics Planning Department.

Could you start by telling us about your business?

Nissho was founded in 1958 as the sales arm of Nitto Denko Corporation. Today we are a specialized trading company handling industrial tapes and films, electronic materials, automotive components, and industrial materials.

Guided by our corporate message, “Contributing to our customers’ value creation through new ideas,” we serve customers across a wide range of industries — with the automotive sector at the core. Beyond simply selling products, we help optimize the entire supply chain, including procurement, logistics, and inventory management.

In recent years especially, companies are increasingly judged on how well they respond to globalization and sudden swings in demand. Reliable product supply and optimized inventory have become priorities for us as well, and we are focused on achieving both at a high level.

How are your departments organized to deliver SCM?

First, our sales division captures customer demand and passes that information to the operations teams at each site, which handle ordering and supply-demand coordination. From there, the information is shared through PlanNEL with the Logistics Planning Department inside operations, which handles inventory management, logistics strategy, and the design of processes and rules.

We do not have a dedicated department that owns SCM end to end. That is precisely why our goal is to build a structure in which every department draws on the same shared data in PlanNEL and can each make the best possible decisions.

What challenges were you facing before adopting PlanNEL?

Before PlanNEL, each person managed information in their own Excel files or relied on our in-house automated ordering system, so operations depended heavily on individual experience and know-how — everything became person-dependent. Because we relied on personal spreadsheets, data analysis took an enormous amount of effort, and balancing inventory reduction with stockout prevention was extremely difficult.

Specifically, when sales passed along customer demand and operations teams at each site were asked to hold stock, the basis for those requests came down to the salesperson’s intuition and experience — it did not exist as objective data. And on the receiving side, each person in operations responded using their own Excel file and their own methods. No one could see what anyone else was doing, data was not shared, and it was impossible to cover for one another.

We did have operating manuals, but a lot still came down to verbal handovers on the job. The result was a set of recurring problems: the rationale behind inventory settings was opaque, and the ability to respond to demand swings rested on specific individuals. Once the number of parts reached the tens of thousands, manual handling had clearly hit its limit. We needed to systematize the work to fundamentally reduce the operational burden.

How did you first learn about PlanNEL, and why did you choose it?

We first came across PlanNEL in an article in the logistics trade publication LOGI-BIZ.

At the time we were evaluating SCM systems with the goals of eliminating person-dependency and balancing inventory reduction with stockout prevention, and we compared about three products.

The other SCM systems we looked at stopped at managing inbound and outbound movement for a single site or warehouse. PlanNEL, by contrast, could optimize the entire supply chain — including the lateral connections that span multiple sites and customers — and its underlying philosophy felt like a natural fit for how we operate.

On features, too, PlanNEL manages everything from demand forecasting to demand planning, inventory planning, and replenishment planning in one place. It also brought in capabilities and ways of thinking our existing systems lacked — AI-based demand forecasting, statistical safety-stock calculation, ABC-XYZ analysis, dashboard visualization, and automatic calculation of order quantities and delivery dates. It covered everything we needed to take inventory management to a more advanced level.

As the trial progressed, we were able to thoroughly validate both the fit with our operations and the results. We also experienced the flexibility that only a SaaS solution can offer — ZIONEX quickly developed and rolled out the features we requested — along with accurate, responsive support from the ZIONEX team. All of this weighed heavily in our decision to adopt PlanNEL.

What changes and results have you seen since adopting PlanNEL?

It has been about a year since we adopted PlanNEL, and the biggest outcome is that we are shifting inventory management from “intuition and experience” to “data and logic.”

Where each person used to manage inventory in their own Excel files or systems, PlanNEL let us standardize the work. As a result, the reasoning — “this figure moved this way, so we’re setting inventory at this level for this reason” — is now transparent to both staff and managers. With the data visualized, departments share a common understanding, and handing over or covering work has become far easier. Our operations teams hold a weekly meeting, and we run study sessions for other departments as well to drive adoption even further.

We have also seen major time savings in day-to-day work. Building the PSI (Production, Sales, Inventory) management table, for instance, used to take about a week for the complex cases; now it is already complete the moment we open PlanNEL. On top of that, roughly 90% of the ordering we once did by hand has been replaced by automatic ordering through PlanNEL, which has significantly lightened the workload.

What would you like to do with PlanNEL going forward?

We want to make active use of PlanNEL for the plan-versus-actual inventory management and variance analysis that we simply never had the capacity for before. And as we use PlanNEL more, more and more data accumulates in the system — so we want to use that data to push demand-forecast accuracy even higher and further advance stockout prevention and inventory optimization.

We also want to integrate PlanNEL with our core business system to automate data ingestion, connecting it to even greater optimization across the entire supply chain.

Finally, do you have a message for readers of this case study?

Many companies that struggle with inventory management are wrestling with how to balance inventory reduction and stockout prevention.

We faced the same challenges, but we approached PlanNEL not as a mere system rollout but as an opportunity for business transformation.

What matters is not introducing the system itself, but using it to standardize operations and build a culture of data-driven decision-making. Within our company, we like to say: “It’s fine if you don’t master it perfectly — just don’t go back to the old way of doing things.”

PlanNEL is, we believe, a powerful system that supports that transformation from the ground up. We will keep improving and continue working to build an even stronger supply chain.