Mitsubishi Heavy Industries

The Client  

Formally established in January 1950, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. is a major Japanese heavy industry manufacturer whose origins can be traced back to 1884, when Mitsubishi entered the shipbuilding industry. With the mission of "incorporating cutting-edge knowledge into technologies cultivated over a long history to solve changing social issues and enrich people's lives," the company manufactures aerospace technology, ships, energy, plants, machinery, automobiles, rolling stock, industrial machinery, and more.

The Situation

In July 2022, the company created the Digital Innovation Division, a new organization dedicated to transforming its customers' business models. One of its divisions, the Digital Platform Innovation (DPI) department, has a mission to improve the experience for customers and employees. The DPI department wanted to build a platform for accessing product information and documents as one of the touch points for customers and others. It needed to provide users with speedy access to the information they were looking for, with appropriate permissions and a sophisticated search experience.

The Challenge

Even before the DPI department was established as a division, the consolidation and digitization of information, as well as a mechanism for sharing it, was a challenge. Soon after it was established, the DPI department set out to find an appropriate solution. There were three main factors that the DPI department considered when selecting a solution.

The first was the ability to manage access authorizations. The ability to control access rights on a page-by-page basis according to the customer’s organization and purchase status was an essential requirement. The DPI department needed to ensure that only customers who purchased the product could view certain product and FAQ information, while other information remained available to customers pre-purchase.

Second, the system had to be scalable to allow API integration with existing systems. The company has a system that integrates user authentication for customers and employees, and one of the key requirements in selecting the platform was that there be room for customization to integrate the API with this authentication system.

The third was the extensibility of the search function, which allows for the connection to a data lake (BOX) outside of Drupal and search against the information in the BOX.

The DPI department was in need of a support system that could provide a wide range of support for Drupal, from setting up the infrastructure environment and DevOps tools, such as CI/CD, to the development and operation of custom modules. Acquia Cloud Platform, a managed service for Drupal that includes these tools, was an attractive solution.

The Solution

In July 2022, the DPI department decided to adopt Acquia Cloud Platform. An agile development project was launched by internal development members to digitize product information for specific departments, and the site was launched in May 2023.
In this launch, the ability to control viewing permissions, highlight keywords in search results, and to include assets from the BOX, such as Word Documents and PDFs, in site searches has been implemented.

The Results

Acquia Cloud Platform allowed the DPI department engineers to focus on the development of new features and enabled a site launch in a short period of time. This site was launched for products and content for a specific department and is the first step in the project. The DPI department plans to continue to promote the company's digitalization by expanding the platform's functionality to include multiple languages and other divisions, while receiving feedback from the departments using the site.