Maruyoshi Center sued Softek for ¥229.9M after a 10-year core system renewal failed

Maruyoshi Center, a supermarket operator based in Kagawa Prefecture, began planning a renewal of its core system — covering purchasing, ordering, sales and inventory — in 2015, because the in-house system it ran was aging and the April 2017 consumption tax hike required changes. It solicited proposals from several vendors and selected Softek in May 2016, choosing a build on Softek's retail package 'RetailFit'. The original delivery deadline was July 2016.

The schedule then kept moving: by December 2016 the plan was to migrate in two steps by February and August 2018 and start live operation chain-wide in September 2018, still leaving headroom for the consumption tax increase that had by then been postponed to October 2019. Work continued to slip past every checkpoint, and the new system was never completed. Maruyoshi Center was forced to commission the development from another IT vendor.

On January 22, 2025, the company announced it had sued Softek for breach of contract, seeking ¥229.9 million in damages including claims for the return of payments made. The two companies' accounts of the cause and responsibility 'clash head-on', according to Nikkei xTECH, which has tracked the project from its planning stages.

¥229.9 million sought in damages including repayment of payments, plus the cost of commissioning a replacement vendor.

The project's deadlines were revised repeatedly — from July 2016 delivery to a two-step 2018 migration to September 2018 go-live — and still slipped past all of them.

The original compliance driver, the April 2017 consumption tax increase, came and went years before the system was ready, removing the forcing function.

A decade of continued reliance on the aging in-house system left the retailer paying for two vendors — the failed build and its replacement.

Liability is disputed: Softek contests the claims, so the retailer faces litigation costs on top of the failed investment.

A core-system renewal that keeps slipping past every deadline is a compounding liability — by the time it formally fails, a decade is gone and the compliance driver with it.

The suit was filed seeking ¥229.9 million in damages and repayment of payments, with the outcome unresolved as of the January 2025 announcement. Softek's position, and any counterclaims, had not been detailed publicly. The report of the filing notes the parties' views on what went wrong 'differ greatly and they are in direct opposition', suggesting a prolonged dispute rather than a quick settlement.