Hitachi Solutions drives transformation with the power of low code

February 28, 2025

For many industries, informed decision-making and optimization has been a game of patchworking legacy systems together, managing data silos, and doing the best they can with limited insights. But with the advent of big data and AI-powered solutions that help different systems, applications, and data sets communicate, ineffective “frankensystems” are quickly becoming a thing of the past—making room for streamlined operations and more efficient business decisions.

As a cloud services systems integrator and longtime Microsoft partner, Hitachi Solutions is at the forefront of this essential streamlining. The organization has one goal across clients and industries: help customers accelerate success through AI-powered solutions. To accomplish this, they work solely with Microsoft technology to implement solutions related to enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), custom app development, and more.

Their Microsoft partnership goes back over a decade—a relationship that Joel Lindstrom, Senior Director of Power Platform, Low Code, and Automation at Hitachi Solutions, credits with powering the organization’s success. This success includes a 25% year-over-year growth and their recent Partner of the Year for Business Applications—Low Code Application Development win. Lindstrom leads the rapid solution development team, which uses Microsoft Power Platform to build AI-powered applications that help customers solve their problems quickly while still bringing in enterprise-grade standards and security.

Hitachi Solutions typically taps into End Customer Investment Funds (ECIF) for each initial engagement. ECIF is a Microsoft offering that provides financial assistance to customers to help them successfully adopt and deploy Microsoft products and solutions. By helping customers unlock this funding, the organization’s rapid solution development team can deliver a primary app experience that addresses real business needs and shows value faster than a typical app development experience. The power of low code applications, according to Lindstrom, is in building solutions quickly and effectively—while giving customers the ability to develop more solutions based on their Power Platform foundations. Once the customer trusts the capabilities of Power Platform, Hitachi Solutions scales using their digital factory methodology, which defines a playbook for success, identifies solutions for common challenges, identifies backlogs that need to be addressed, and builds solutions rapidly and in a way that helps customers truly understand and adopt Power Platform beyond their Hitachi Solutions engagement.

“Back in the spreadsheet days, you’d have data all over the place,” explains Lindstrom. “Power Platform, on the other hand, is built to give companies the ability to have central control, management, and governance over their operations—while empowering people to quickly meet their goals.”

Tapping into low code for an innovative, adaptable solution

To address these four challenges, Hitachi Solutions turned to low code development, which empowers developers to build applications faster and improves collaboration between technical and non-technical teams. They began building their customer’s governance application as a roadmap for other applications—both those Hitachi Solutions would be building and applications the customer might want to build in the future. Their rapid solution development team got to work using their digital factory methodology and quickly built out a governance solution, which in turn helped them build project management, internal controls, and performance and development apps.

Lindstrom explained Power Platform’s ability to deliver complex solutions in an easy and effective way: “We can use Power Platform to connect to data where it is. It provides a single pane of glass to see everything you need. If I have data in 20 different systems, I can use connectors and automations through Power Platform to tie it all together.”

Hitachi Solutions offered an extensive training program to over 50 of the organization’s key employees in order to roll these solutions out to the 12,000-person company and set the organization up for future success. Their training methodology was so effective that the customer has since been able to build more Power Platform apps and extend use cases to further increase operational efficiency.

The customer almost immediately reported improved operational efficiency and increased self-sufficiency: by automating and digitizing previously manual and fragmented processes, Hitachi Solutions was able to significantly improve data accuracy across human resources, finance, and project management functions. Perhaps more importantly, the customer has also reported that the way in which Hitachi Solutions implemented these solutions has empowered their organization to explore and leverage Power Platform, leading to a surge in internal innovations and process improvements. This culture of continuous feedback and development is going to serve the customer well for years to come.