Their challenge

Japan’s Hoshizaki Corp makes food service equipment, including ice machines, dishwashers, and beverage dispensers. Hoshizaki America is its subsidiary, and two of Hoshizaki America’s brands – Jackson and Lancer – offer warewashing and beverage dispensing equipment. These three businesses make up Hoshizaki’s US holdings.

While Hoshizaki America, Jackson, and Lancer all fall under Hoshizaki, each historically operated in silos and began pursuing ERP upgrades separately. MCA Connect was in talks with Lancer for a Dynamics 365 upgrade, Hoshizaki America was evaluating Oracle, and Jackson had decided to go with Infor.

MCA Connect advised the brands to take a unified regional approach and helped align the businesses, increasing the deal opportunity for Microsoft. As a result, Hoshizaki Corp leadership decided Hoshizaki America, Jackson, and Lancer should implement the same ERP solution.

Our solution

Leveraging our deep manufacturing expertise, we familiarized ourselves with all three brands and identified their unique features and similarities. Hoshizaki needed a platform to meet the needs of its America divisions while being flexible enough to accommodate growth and new acquisitions. Additionally, Hoshizaki placed a great emphasis on change management

To meet these needs, we developed an integrated regional implementation methodology that includes strategic change management. This approach proved successful, and we secured Dynamics 365 for all three brands.

MCA Connect will implement the following solutions for the Hoshizaki America, Jackson, and Lancer, generating $3 million in licensing over three years:    

• Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management 
• Dynamics 365 Sales 
• Power BI for reporting and analytics  
• MCA Connect Inspire Platform, a modern analytics platform enabling advanced machine learning and AI 

Expected results

After building out a detailed implementation strategy and plan, we’ll complete a staggered go-live process. Jackson is first in line with an anticipated go-live of June 2024. Once all entities are live, Hoshizaki America, Jackson, and Lancer will:

Unify businesses on a single platform to streamline operations and empower better decision-making with analytics that roll up to headquarters in Japan.

Significantly improve procurement capabilities, efficiency, and supplier relationship management for all three entities.

Achieve operational efficiency through automation and standardization.

Better enable growth and acquisitions with the ability to seamlessly integrate new businesses and data sources in Dynamics 365.

What’s next?

MCA Connect is in talks with Macomb, Hoshizaki’s Brazil-based refrigeration brand, to incorporate Macomb into the Dynamics 365 integration project.