Sakae replaces 50 years of manual processes and gains 40% productivity

The company

Sakae has been making furniture in Japan since 1969, but not the kind you buy for a living room. They make the kind you sit on in a public park, a schoolyard, or a gymnasium: benches, pergolas, swings, and slides. Most of its customers are public sector, and that shapes how the company operates.

Opportunities come through industry newspapers, where governors and local officials post announcements for quoting and bidding. Sakae puts together a proposal with specifications and a quote, and if it wins the bid, manufacturing starts. Parts get ordered, the product gets built, shipped, and set up on site, and then the invoice goes out. It's a long chain with a lot of steps, and for most of the company's history, all of it ran by hand.

The challenge

Sixty years of experience had built a strong manufacturing business on top of a weak technological framework. Sakae ran on an old client-server system, some spreadsheets, and paper. There was no automation anywhere in the chain. Every quote, every bill of materials, and every invoice was entered by hand—and often entered more than once across different sheets.

For a company that had been reluctant to adopt new technology for decades, the decision to replace their legacy systems was itself a shift. The harder part came next.

The first option they looked at, an off-the-shelf manufacturing solution, was expensive and rigid. It couldn't bend to the way Sakae actually worked, and Sakae's business flow was genuinely complex, spanning bidding, procurement, hierarchical bills of materials, and invoicing. Then they evaluated a well-known Japanese low-code platform, but it simply didn't have the features they needed.

Zoho Creator was where they landed. It had the depth they were after, it was straightforward enough to build with in-house, and it cost a fraction of the off-the-shelf option.

The solution

Using Zoho Creator and Deluge, Zoho's scripting language, Sakae built a system to run its entire end-to-end process in six months. AorBorC, a Zoho Partner, helped with the app development, but Sakae built most of it themselves, and that ownership shaped everything that came after.

Going cloud-based also took infrastructure management off their plate entirely, which freed the team to spend its time on the work that actually moved the business. The solution runs across multiple departments today, with over 40 users spread across four cities: Tokyo, Sendai, Osaka, and Nagoya.

It's built around four core modules:

1. Sales Orders

The entry point, this module registers the customer order along with its requirements, so everything downstream is working from the same starting record.

2. Purchase Orders

This verifies the order details and captures the specifics that the rest of the process depends on: customer details, deal title, due date, region, sales owner, deal type, and quotes.

3. Bills of Materials

Manufacturing furniture means tracking a lot of parts, and not in a flat list. The BoM module lays out every product and part needed for a sales order in a hierarchical structure, which is how the work actually gets planned and ordered.

4. Invoicing

Once the product is delivered, this module generates the invoice, pulling the data it needs from Zoho Books rather than having someone reassemble it by hand.

Benefits and ROI

Once the product is delivered, this module generates the invoice, pulling the data it needs from Zoho Books rather than having someone reassemble it by hand.

• 40% increase in productivity: By Takeuchi's account, that's the overall lift the company saw after the custom solution went live. Subforms, lookup fields, and dashboards let Sakae tighten up its data management and costing.
• Zero duplicate data entry: The old way meant entering the same change across several spreadsheets. Now a change is made once and updates in real time across every department.
• The communication gap closed: With everyone working from the same live data, the delays and mismatches that used to come from departments working off separate sheets disappeared.
• Fewer errors and less wasted time: With no duplicate entry and no manual reconciliation to get wrong, both dropped.
• No infrastructure to manage: Going cloud-based meant the team stopped maintaining servers and started spending that time on higher-value work.

Looking ahead

Sakae spent five decades wary of new technology, then replaced the whole manual operation in six months once it found a platform that fit. The features got them in the door—owning the build, and being able to keep changing it, is what kept paying off.