Syniti’s Data First Strategy Drives Successful Completion of One of Bridgestone EMEA’s Largest Transformation Projects

⇨ Syniti partnered with Bridgestone EMEA to support one of the largest transformation projects in the company's history, migrating to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, with a focus on eliminating siloes and improving operational efficiency across 26 European countries.

⇨ Despite challenges such as a compressed timeline and outdated systems, Bridgestone achieved a 100% master data load and a 90% improvement in migrated master data accuracy, enhancing their data quality and enabling better alignment with their business transformation goals.

⇨ The partnership exemplifies the importance of centralized master data management strategies, as noted in SAPinsider research, highlighting a growing trend among organizations to prioritize data-driven decision-making and standardized data governance.

Syniti, SAP partner and provider of enterprise data management solutions, recently partnered with Bridgestone EMEA, the regional strategic business unit of Bridgestone Corporation, a global leader in premium tires and sustainable mobility solutions. The partnership aimed to deliver one of the largest transformation projects in Bridgestone’s history — its migration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The company’s goal was to remove siloes across the organization by consolidating business processes across its SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) system into one SAP S/4HANA Cloud instance allowing the company to improve operational efficiency, data accuracy and set the stage for future growth, automation, and innovation in the tire and mobility sectors.

The project, spanning 26 European countries, was launched as previous attempts with a Big Bang go-live faced challenges. With just nine months until their planned 2024 go-live, Bridgestone turned to Syniti to support a successful launch. The project was not without its challenges; the compressed timeline meant multiple data loads had to be fit into a shortened time frame. Outdated systems brought data quality and integration issues, resulting in Bridgestone’s business experiencing continuous modifications during the migration process – requiring flexibility and precision from the Syniti project team. Despite these challenges, Bridgestone achieved a 100% master data load, significantly enhancing their data accuracy, and achieved a 0.001% variance in inventory reconciliation — a critical component of their financial audits.

Syniti’s Data First approach delivered significant results, including a 90% improvement in migrated master data accuracy. This accurate and reliable data became the cornerstone of Bridgestone’s new business processes, allowing the company to more fully realize the benefits of its SAP S/4HANA Cloud investment. By consolidating Bridgestone’s processes and improving data quality, the company is now better positioned to automate and innovate within the tire and mobility sector. This partnership allowed Bridgestone to more fully realize its business transformation goals by aligning to common standards that enhance efficiency across multiple business processes and increase scalability across its operations.

Bridgestone’s attention to master data harmonizes with recent findings from SAPinsider research. In the recent SAPinsider research report Data Management Strategies, organizations implementing a centralized master data strategy (48%) emerged as the top data management strategy, indicating that organizations recognize the importance of establishing centralized approaches to manage master data effectively. This was followed by deploying modern data integration, data orchestration, and data migration tools (42%) underscoring organizations’ preparations for transitioning to the cloud and representing a 16-percentage point increase over 2023.

Bart Kerkhofs, CIO and Vice President of IT at Bridgestone EMEA, stated: “Our company is speeding up its transformation to be even more customer oriented, agile, efficient, data driven, sustainable and future-proof. This necessitates a comprehensive approach that encompasses all facets of our operations including upscaling our digital capabilities to elevate the overall stakeholder experience. Syniti was critical in helping us improve our approach to manage the data for our ambitious transformation effort. The Syniti team has proven they can do the hard things; their credibility was already established, and we knew we could trust their Data First approach to achieve excellent results.”

Bridgestone is not alone in its aspiration to become more data-driven. The modern data-driven enterprise can be described as an organization that prioritizes the use of data as a fundamental element of its strategic decision-making processes. Defining attributes include the following:

• Data sets are consolidated into a unified architecture to provide a comprehensive view
• Employs advanced analytical tools and technologies to extract insights from data
• Culture of data literacy
• Decision-making processes are predominantly based on data analysis
• Adopts predictive analytics to forecast future trends and behaviors
• Data governance frameworks are in place to ensure data quality, privacy, and compliance

Kevin Campbell, CEO, Syniti, said: “We are proud to have played a key role in Bridgestone EMEA’s digital transformation. Our team’s dedication to delivering high-quality data and seamless migration was central to the success of this ambitious project and underscores our commitment to handling the hardest work in data for the world’s largest companies like Bridgestone. This collaboration highlights the power of trusted partnerships and the transformative impact of Syniti’s software, methodology, and our skilled team of professionals — led by our Data First approach.”

What this means for SAPinsiders

Share your data management strategies. The focus on enterprise data management is intensifying with the proliferation of 5G, IoT, AI/ML and other transformative technologies. SAP customers are increasingly looking for new data management models for the storage, migration, integration, governance, protection, transformation, and processing of all kinds of data ranging from transactional to analytical. Balancing the risks, compliance needs, and costs of data management in SAP HANA on-premise and on the cloud while also providing reliable, secure data to the organization is increasingly important to the business We will be releasing the 2025 Data Management Strategies research report in February 2025. Contribute to the research by completing this survey: https://www.research.net/r/DataMgt25.

Establish clear data governance. Identify clear data owners and stewards across departments to ensure accountability and proper data management during and after the migration. Develop or update enterprise-wide data governance policies that define how data will be captured, stored, accessed, and used in SAP S/4HANA. This will guide consistent practices across the organization. Implement or optimize a master data management (MDM) system to ensure a single source of truth for core business data (e.g., customer, vendor, product data) in the new S/4HANA system.

Set a clear data migration strategy for the move to SAP S/4HANA. Choose between a greenfield (full reimplementation with fresh data) or brownfield (system conversion) migration approach. A greenfield approach gives you more flexibility to redesign processes and data structures, while a brownfield approach preserves existing customizations and processes. Some organizations opt for a hybrid or selective data transition approach, migrating essential business processes and data while decommissioning legacy data and structures. Map data from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA structures, considering changes in data models (e.g., the universal journal in S/4HANA). Use transformation tools to automate data mapping and transformation.