LIXIL Uses HDP to Be First in Manufacturing for the Japanese Smart Home Market

LIXIL Uses HDP to Be First in Manufacturing for the Japanese Smart Home Market

Hortonworks continues to expand its list of customers in the Asia Pacific region, as well as in the housing and building industry. We recently completed a case study to showcase how LIXIL Corporation uses HDP to be first in manufacturing for the Japanese Smart Home Market.

READ THE FULL LIXIL CASE STUDY HERE

LIXIL is a leading manufacturer of materials and equipment for Japan’s housing and building industry. It was incorporated in 2011 through a merger of five of Japan’s leading building materials and housing companies. Following the merger, LIXIL began an IT system integration project to support its global operations and more than 80,000 worldwide employees. LIXIL adopted Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP®) for its global analytics platform, and it is revamping its operations to achieve a proactive IT environment.

HDP’s 100% open-source flexibility has allowed LIXIL to rapidly integrate it with other components of its IT architecture, such as its SAP HANA in-memory database. Now LIXIL uses HDP for data at rest: for processing, statistical analysis, and machine learning on access logs from external SNS and websites and to store a growing deluge of IoT data. SAP HANA is used for processing data from the operations system, and after linking both systems together, LIXIL now performs a wider range of analytics.

Masaki Shobu, manager of the Information Excellence Group in Lixil’s Information Systems Department commented on the company’s analytical strategy and how it promises to benefit its customers. “The scope of IoT for domestic use, such as smart homes and smart cities, will continue expanding in the future. Japan is a world leader in this area and LIXIL is active in the industry as a leading company in building materials and equipment. We aim to provide a safe, secure, and comfortable living environment by using analytical data extensively,” says Shobu.

In a 2016 Forbes article titled How Big Data And Analytics Are Transforming The Construction Industry, author Bernard Marr described the attraction of Big Data technologies to the industry: “Project managers can quickly gain an overview of QA, safety, workforce and equipment data, simplifying the task of identifying risk and evaluating performance. Problems can be identified before they emerge, leading to large time and expense savings on remedial work.”

In the pursuit of similar advantages, LIXIL’s Information Systems Department continues to expand its expertise with and use of HDP components such as HDFS and YARN in core Apache Hadoop, Apache Hive for SQL processing, Apache Spark for fast in-memory analytics and Apache Ambari for cluster operations.

The Hortonworks HDP Support organization shares its expertise across those components with Lixil, so the company can optimize the business value it derives from each. Hortonworks expertise spans both the technical projects and the business use cases. Our company has developed that expertise over years supporting many other building, logistics, manufacturing and materials enterprises.

Ryohei Kubota, project manager for the Information Excellence Group, in the Information Systems Department describes the value of Hortonworks support this way, “Hortonworks is able to provide prompt support even for new technologies developed by the Apache Hadoop community. For example, the ORC file format is optimized for Hive processing. We were impressed by their high technical skills and constant support.”

Those technical skills for Hive and ORC are directly proportional to the large number of Hortonworks developers who are Apache Hive committers and members of the Project Management Committee (PMC). Many of those committers spearheaded development of the ORC file format, including Owen O’Malley, who shared this post in 2015 when Apache ORC launched as a top-level Apache project.

Whatever new LIXIL use cases emerge, the Hortonworks support and engineering teams look forward to helping the company be first in the rapidly expanding Japanese market for smart homes!

Justin Sears
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