Atena Mailing room (c) AtenaIn Japan, the leading provider of direct marketing and outsourcing services, Atena,  went live on Infor Warehouse Management System (WMS). The organisation deployed the solution in the AWS Cloud. The implementation included deploying the solution across its three logistics centres in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya.

Since its founding in 1968, Atena has focused on direct mailing, logistics, and providing contact centres for customers. It has over 33,000 square meters of space and distributes more than five million packages, mainly sales promotion materials annually. In 2009 it deployed a logistics solution; however, with customisations, it found itself locked in and unable to modernise that solution.

It, therefore, decided to review the market and, after considering ten different solutions, selected Infor WMS. It also decided to deploy the Infor WMS solution from AWS. This enabled it to reduce its operational and maintenance costs for existing IT systems improving the return on investment. Importantly AWS could also offer the scalability to meet peak demands without having to go through costly upgrades.

Atena has built a DX platform to support further growth, including the ability to cope with triple the workload during peak periods. The solution supports both B2C (Business-to-Consumer) and 3PLs in specific industries. Atena is rapidly expanding its business process outsourcing services. It has created several BPO centres to support this growth, the latest in Yamaguchi. The direct mailing and logistics centres support these to assist the marketing efforts of customers.

More than just a system change

As part of the project, Atena standardised its logistics processes. This will enable it to leverage the cost savings that a cloud solution can deliver, both following implementation but also as the solution is upgraded. The changes have led to cost labour savings the total cost of ownership. The company has leveraged the standard, extensive functionality of Infor WMS and  personalise its solution through configuration changes rather than development

In the future, Atena will continue to drive its own digital transformation by leveraging more features of Infor WMS. It intends to implement robotic process automation (RPA) as part of this. Whether it will leverage Infor Coleman as part of this or a third-party application is unclear.

Yoshiaki Taniguchi, Operation Officer and General Manager of Digital BPO Service Department at Atena Corporation, commented: “To achieve our mission of providing various support for every need of our customers, we have to drive Digital Transformation with a sense of urgency without relying on external resources. By building a cloud-based Infor WMS roll-out with rich functionality specialized by industry, we are able to focus on new initiatives that lead to business growth while improving business operations, and we can accumulate in-house knowledge and continue our transformation.”

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

Atena is another significant win for Infor in Japan. The company is gaining momentum in Japan, increasing its channel ecosystem and customer base. Importantly these appear to be net-new wins and completely in a competitive tender. If Aterna is willing to share more of the benefits that Infor has delivered with the WMS solution it may help Infor grow even faster, to the detriment of its rivals.

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