Miratap Inc. (formerly Sanwa Company) handles everything from the planning and development to the sale of building materials. Known as a forward-thinking company, it launched an online mail-order business for building materials as early as 2000.
For this project, we built a member site for the company's partners (its affiliated home builders). This article shows how the company put Kanal-WEB, our service for building member sites with kintone®, to work.
The Challenge: An Information-Sharing Platform That Combines Design and Usability
Building a Well-Designed Member Site in a Short Time
What Is ASOLIE Design Network, the Company's Original Member Site?
Miratap (formerly Sanwa Company) was founded in 1979 to import and sell building materials. Built around its original products, the company has won strong market support for its stylish designs. But that is not the only reason it attracts attention.
"We want to simplify distribution, show customers clear prices, and sell high-performance, well-designed products at fair prices. Our goal is to make our approach the standard in the building materials industry, where pricing is often opaque," says a representative of the company's Space Design Division (SD Division).
Beyond online sales, the company is also highly regarded for continually challenging industry norms through initiatives such as one-price policies and transparent pricing.
One of its current new projects is ASOLIE, a housing franchise business run together with its member companies. The company shares its "design code"—its own planning and design methodology—with affiliated builders, enabling local builders to bring highly designed, flexible homes to market. Our role was to build ASOLIE Design Network, a member portal site that connects these builders with the company.
Intuitive to Use, and Stylish
ASOLIE holds seminars for its member companies, such as design training sessions. It also provides sales promotion tools, including construction case studies, image assets, and video assets that can be used on social media. Initially, this information was shared via Dropbox, and customers were contacted by email.
The representative who oversaw the business at the time recalls, "I always felt that the tools we were using didn't match our brand image, and I wanted to build a tool that could also serve as an archive."
"Because of the nature of our products, many of our customers and partners place great importance on design. If we were going to build a member portal site, we also wanted it to be stylish enough to strengthen customer loyalty."
Another priority was making it easy for users to access. For builders and people working on job sites, the PC is not their main work tool. They needed a system that would let them reach the information they need intuitively, with nothing more than an ID and password.
The fact that the company was already using kintone internally also helped tip the balance. "Since the back end could be managed in kintone, we also expected that connecting ASOLIE Design Network with our internal systems in the future could create new synergies."
The Solution: A Dealer Portal for Affiliated Home Builders
With the introduction of ASOLIE Design Network built on Kanal-WEB, the operations team at Miratap (formerly Sanwa Company) has dramatically reduced the time it spent contacting customers. Partners can now instantly access well-organized information from a variety of devices, not just PCs, without the frustration of searching, so they can make more effective use of the information they receive.
The company was able to introduce exactly the tool it had hoped for: one that matches its brand image, is easy for users to access, and is stylish. The number of member registrations continues to grow.
Launching a Highly Designed, Flexible Portal Site in a Short Time
A portal site that meets requirements like these would normally have to be built from scratch, which also takes a considerable amount of time. ASOLIE Design Network, however, was up and running in about six months.
Kanal-WEB is a product for building member sites with kintone, developed in-house by our company. Its strength is the ability to launch highly designed, flexible portal sites at relatively low cost and in a short time.
Several months have now passed since the system went live. The person currently in charge of operating and managing ASOLIE Design Network told us, "I've only been in this role for about a month and a half, but I haven't had any trouble with operations or management. I really like how intuitive it is."
Kanal-WEB was born out of the need to "easily build member sites using kintone." Going forward, we will continue to use this platform to focus on building systems that are easy to use and offer a high degree of design freedom.
(Interviewed in September 2023)
New Services Made Possible by Kanal-WEB
Kanal-WEB, the service used in this Miratap (formerly Sanwa Company) case study, is a My Page builder that integrates with kintone. It brings together the kintone member management apps you already run, so you can build a new My Page (member site). It is a system developed specifically for building My Pages, designed to deliver convenience that makes the most of a My Page's benefits, along with simple, easy operation.
You can add member services while making full use of the data you have accumulated, without the headaches of managing member information in two places or integrating separate systems.
With highly usable design and navigation that anyone with basic PC skills can handle, Kanal-WEB lets you introduce and run a My Page smoothly, at a relatively low cost and in less time than developing a system from scratch.
Kanal-WEB comes with essential features as standard, and you can build an even more capable member site by adding optional features to suit your needs. For product details and pricing, please see this page.
If you would like a more detailed explanation or a quote for your specific project, please feel free to contact us. *We also offer an online demo and a trial, as described below.
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