Bridgestone

About the Company

Bridgestone in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (Bridgestone EMEA) is the regional Strategic Business Unit of Bridgestone Corporation, a global leader in premium tyres and sustainable mobility solutions. Bridgestone offers a diverse portfolio of premium tyres, tyre technologies, and advanced mobility solutions.

Project Background

With ambitions to remove silos and consolidate their ECC system into one SAP S/4HANA system across 26 European countries, Bridgestone embarked on a massive business transformation endeavor. Leveraging SAP technologies and enabled with quality data due to Syniti’s Data First approach, Bridgestone was able to leverage and realize the value of their investments and newly designed business processes.

The existing systems in place suffered from siloed data and outdated data prep processes, all operating independently. Bridgestone aimed for a more comprehensive solution to help drive business transformation across their operations and boost efficiency and scalability.

With only nine months remaining until their planned 2024 go-live, Bridgestone reached out to Syniti as their trusted data partner, leveraging our experienced resources to provide reliable, quality data, along with guidance towards a “Boring Go-Live®”. Once engaging with Syniti, Bridgestone quickly noted the domain expertise.

Implementation Highlights

To accelerate their transformation to SAP S/4HANA and their consequent business transformation, Bridgestone enlisted Syniti’s trusted data migration and data quality services and solutions.

“Syniti supported us in re-aligning our approach to managing our data in this ambitious transformation effort,” explained Bart Kerkhofs, CIO and VP of IT at Bridgestone EMEA. “We needed to invest in the experts and make systemic changes to achieve our timeline and critical business goals.”

Using a previously installed version of Syniti Knowledge Platform, Syniti consultants were quickly able to re-align the setup and design. Syniti’s Data First approach delivered significant results, including a 90% improvement in migrated master data accuracy.

Capitalizing on this, Bridgestone turned to Syniti for guidance on improved data quality, interested to define a repeatable process fit for their specific business requirements. With Syniti, Bridgestone was able to implement customized operational processes and solutions to support the creation and distribution of data cleansing reports. This was important in ensuring their S/4HANA operations would be able to utilize the data from day one. Luckily, much of this data governance effort was able to be re-purposed for the ongoing S/4HANA data journey.

Challenges

On the Road to S/4HANA

During a typical data migration, no changes are allowed after the final practice data load or “dress rehearsal”. The nature of Bridgestone’s dynamic business, however, meant the migration process had to accommodate a near constant rate of change.

What’s more, the compacted project timeframe made it imperative to follow a strict schedule; exact execution at all levels was critical. What typically took multiple data loads had to be fit into fewer loads and an even shorter amount of time.

The team were up against multiple hurdles:

High Rate of Change: Constant modifications between dress rehearsal and cutover challenged conventional data migration and testing processes.
Tight Timeframe: A strict timeline made it imperative to reduce manual tasks and automate wherever possible.
Outdated Design: Legacy systems, some over two decades old, posed additional hurdles to the migration and data quality execution

Why Syniti

Syniti’s team of expert consultants not only facilitated data migration results and orchestrated a tight cutover, leading to an on-time Boring Go-Live, but they also ensured an ongoing data quality process, enabling tighter data governance and improving transparency for significantly more visibility across the business.

By leveraging S/4HANA and SAP’s new data structures, Syniti was able to put Bridgestone in a better position to take full advantage of their newly transformed operating model. Bridgestone is now poised for future automations, leveraging their quality data and removing the need to manually review and approve all data issues when identified.

“Syniti has proven they can do hard things. Syniti’s credibility was already established, and we knew we could trust the Data First approach with the implementation,” said Kerkhofs.

Results

Through collaboration with Syniti, Bridgestone navigated the complexities of a Big Bang migration of SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA, transforming their operations and positioning themselves for continued growth, automation, and innovation within the automotive industry.

Working closely with Bridgestone resources and other Partners, the Syniti team were able to achieve results:

• 100% master data loaded
• 90% improvement in migrated master data accuracy
• 99.9% load accuracy for all other 2nd and 3rd tier Objects

Typically, an arduous, if not painful process in any data migration, inventory reconciliation is critical to a company’s financials and audibility. Syniti was able to help Bridgestone establish stock traceability, reconciling inventory to within 0.001% variance.

Syniti’s support extended beyond implementation, providing Bridgestone with ongoing hyper-care and stabilization, ensuring readiness for future endeavors.

The project helped upscale Bridgestone’s digital capabilities and empower business users through the upgrade of their ERP software to SAP S/4HANA.