Tokio Marine Case Study: Scaling a 1M+ User Information Portal

Key Takeaways

Powering a massive information ecosystem that serves a workforce of over one million users.
Rising user demand and the limitations of legacy tech sparked the move toward a next-generation platform.
Liferay emerged as the clear winner, proving it could handle the mission-critical demands of a global industry leader.
The transition has been a total success, delivering rock-solid stability and a major surge in user engagement.

Background

As Japan’s premier property and casualty insurance giant, Tokyo Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance leveraged Liferay DXP to completely overhaul its mission-critical ecosystem. This digital transformation unified their information portal and digital manual systems, serving a massive network of both internal employees and external insurance agents.

Content Management

Employee Portals

Intranets

Challenges

Achieving rock-solid system stability and high-speed performance across a massive user base exceeding one million people.
Driving agent engagement through superior UI and search capabilities, while simultaneously slashing the volume of help desk inquiries.
Facing the limits of legacy architecture as user demand skyrocketed

We needed a solution that offered high-performance scalability to support one million users while remaining cost-effective. Liferay delivered the perfect balance: a feature-rich environment with seamless SSO integration and the flexibility to be fully customized to our specific needs.

IT Department

Tokyo Marine & Nichido

Implementation

The legacy system was a heavily customized, fragmented setup based on an older open-source version of Liferay. When it came time to modernize, the IT Planning Department collaborated with Tokio Marine & Nichido Systems to evaluate top-tier solutions recognized by global analysts. After a deep dive into functionality, domestic support, and cost-efficiency, they determined that Liferay DXP was the only platform capable of serving as their next-generation architecture.

"When you’re supporting a million users, there is zero room for error," an IT spokesperson explained. The goal was to find a platform that offered elite performance and cost-effective licensing without sacrificing the power of SSO integration or the flexibility for bespoke customization. Beyond these requirements, Liferay was specifically chosen for its ability to meet stringent financial industry guidelines and provide sophisticated, enterprise-grade access control, ensuring that every document remained secure and compliant.

The implementation was a high-stakes collaborative effort. Hitachi, Ltd. joined as the primary systems integrator, supported by the specialized expertise of Oxygen Design. This partnership kicked off the requirement definition phase in June 2022, immediately facing the project's most daunting hurdle: a massive data migration.

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Digital Experience Platforms: Designed for Digital Transformation

The portal held 20 years of accumulated institutional knowledge, but it also contained legacy "ghost" data and outdated formats. The team had to meticulously scrub a mountain of content to ensure nothing was lost or broken. A single layout error could lead to a misinterpretation of an insurance policy, and a single permission error could lead to a data breach. It wasn't just a move; it was a high-precision digital transplant that required checking every single document individually.

In terms of build strategy, while the previous system was largely built from scratch, the new approach prioritized Liferay’s robust "out-of-the-box" features to ensure long-term stability and easier maintenance. However, the team did leverage customization where it mattered most—specifically to solve the old "search clutter" problem. By engineering a sophisticated hashtag-based tagging system, they allowed users to bypass irrelevant keyword hits and pinpoint exactly what they needed with surgical precision.

This mission-critical journey spanned 20 months of meticulous planning. By maintaining constant, transparent communication between Tokyo Marine, TM&N Systems, Hitachi, and Oxygen Design, the team managed to navigate the complexities of the migration and transform a massive challenge into a landmark success for the company.

Results

Executed a seamless, fail-safe migration of massive document volumes from mission-critical legacy systems.
Modernized the existing CMS environment with the latest Liferay platform, dramatically enhancing system responsiveness and ease of use.
Optimized usability by re-engineering portal navigation and implementing real-time content lifecycle management.
Substantially reduced long-term operational and maintenance overhead, delivering a leaner and more cost-effective infrastructure.

What's Next

Looking ahead, Tokyo Marine & Nichido plans to evolve the platform into a "self-service" portal, aiming to further increase user autonomy and slash the time spent on help desk inquiries.

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