200+
data systems mastered
Weeks
saved in data processing
Faster
business decision-making
With "Make Waves" as its brand promise, Yamaha Corporation aimed to promote customer-centric manufacturing with a new data integration infrastructure. By linking and visualizing information across product, financial and customer domains, the music leader uses Informatica to improve the speed and quality of its business decision-making.
“We chose Informatica for its ability to comprehensively use diverse functions in a multi-cloud environment, future product vision and the abundance of engineers due to 20 years of experience in Japan.”
The path to customer-centric manufacturing excellence
In 1887, founder Torakusu Yamaha began manufacturing organs after repairing a broken one. Ten years later, Nippon Gakki Manufacturing Company (now Yamaha Corporation) was established. For over 130 years, the company has provided various products and services, starting with musical instruments. Currently, it operates globally in three business domains –musical instruments, audio equipment, and other parts and accessories– growing into a global leader with strong brand power.
Yamaha has positioned the three years from April 2022 as a period to "enhance sustainable growth capability in a new society" in their medium-term management plan, working to further increase corporate value. It follows the corporate philosophy of "Creating 'Kando' Together" throughout the group. Aiming to contribute to "enriching people's lives around the world," Yamaha embraced "Make Waves" as its brand promise, expressing moments that make customers' hearts tremor, and sought to advance the integration of data platforms to connect with customers and enhance sustainable growth.
Yoshiaki Murakami, Leader of the ERP Strategy Group in the Information Systems Department, says: "This is an initiative to support decision-making by linking and visualizing information from various systems operating within the company. We aim to create a system where all employees can view data with the same accuracy, granularity and perspective."
"When general business users need data, the AI-powered CLAIRE® GPT will help organize vague needs and suggest where the desired data is stored and how to use it, such as searching for product information existing in respective systems, drastically expanding corporate data utilization.”
Building consensus for a new MDM strategy
Yamaha decided to implement Informatica integrated master data management (MDM) solution, Multidomain MDM SaaS, as a mechanism for data integration and visualization. The solution ensures accurate synchronization of master data shared between various organizations and systems within the company, enabling centralized management of master data across business domains such as product information, business partner and account subject. This enables company-wide data analysis rather than system-by-system or database-by-database analysis, leading to improved master data quality and reliability.
Murakami reflects, "Regarding MDM, we collected tools and case studies from 2019 and started internal discussions assuming actual implementation in June 2020." Although the necessity of data integration and utilization was a shared view, it was difficult to gain understanding from each business division and management about the specific benefits and expected results of MDM, given that teams operated over 200 systems globally and throughout daily operations. The project started with efforts to reconfirm the status of systems and data utilization, identify issues and build internal consensus for implementing the MDM solution.
Yamaha established a cross-functional "DX Strategy Committee" to advise the president on digital transformation (DX), creating a system to discuss company-wide DX policies and IT strategies. Murakami, who participated in this DX Strategy Committee and made more than five proposals covering topics from what master data is and what effects can be obtained by utilizing it to actual implementation methods, reflects: "We believed that MDM implementation was unavoidable to realize the data strategy aligned with Yamaha's ‘sustainable growth’ plan."
Diverse data functions drive integration success
Informatica Multidomain MDM SaaS is a cloud solution that not only collects data distributed across various systems and processes it as master data but also provides functions for managing data viewing/usage permissions and tracking data such as change history. It is one of many services that constitute Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), which integrates various data management functions such as data integration, API integration, data quality management, data catalog and governance.
"We chose Informatica from multiple candidates considering their ability to comprehensively use diverse functions in a multi-cloud environment, future product vision and the abundance of engineers due to 20 years of experience in Japan," says Murakami. "It was also a unique benefit of Informatica that their consultants supported Yamaha's internal consensus-building in tandem and we could share abundant case studies from other companies."
Kazuhiro Shiba from the ERP Strategy Group in the Information Systems Department, who was involved in the implementation, emphasizes the usefulness of Informatica's support services: "Although I had little knowledge about data management myself, the support from Informatica Professional Services (IPS) was detailed and they shared knowledge such as How-To's and best practices, which made the development smooth."
Yukari Uchida from the same ERP Strategy Group says that Informatica's ease of use and intuitive UI also contributed to smooth development. "Even as an Informatica beginner, I could create samples of data catalogs and marketplaces to publish them in one to two weeks by following the manual step-by-step. We actually had interns use it as material to experience Yamaha's business and they could create data catalog samples similarly with careful explanation," highly evaluating Informatica's development productivity.
Data democratization and Gen AI on the horizon
Murakami envisions the intended implementation benefits: "From a situation where we extract data stored in different formats from multiple systems and process it manually over several weeks, we want to eventually enable everyone to utilize necessary data in a short time, starting from MDM and data catalog."
As an example, product codes such as “GMC: Global Material Code” are assigned to each product with power units that comply with different standards for each region, including Japan, America and Europe. By linking product codes and model names, management across multiple departments such as development, procurement and maintenance becomes possible with the opportunity for significant business improvements.
Regarding the MDM system, Murakami says, "Going forward, we expect that advancing data utilization from being done through personnel with special knowledge and know-how to being more freely usable by general business users will lead to improved operational efficiency and strengthened management speed."
Data management is not a one-time effort but should take root as corporate culture. Murakami also mentions the possibilities of AI, including Informatica Generative AI function, CLAIRE® GPT: "We expect that when general business users need data, the AI-powered CLAIRE® GPT will help organize vague needs and suggest where the desired data is stored and how to use it, such as searching for product information existing in respective systems, drastically expanding corporate data utilization.”
Murakami continues: "From a customer perspective, we want to provide products and services that will make customers even happier. By choosing Informatica’s solution as the data platform for this purpose, our prospects are brighter than ever.”
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