Yamaha revs business in the cloud

Democratized

Real time data access

2 months

Activated IDMC platform

Minimized

IT costs and overhead

Stat Image

As part of a movement to build a “One Yamaha” brand for its customers and internal stakeholders, Yamaha embarked on a digital transformation and modernization journey to create greater consistency in data across its many business units and data streams. By leveraging Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), the company unified its data and analytics onto one comprehensive, AI-powered platform. The ability to access real-time data has driven collaboration among teams, streamlined its operations and improved its customer experiences — all while reducing IT costs and overhead.

Read Full Interview Transcript

Monider Manic: My name is Monider Manic. I'm a senior manager at Yamaha Motors.

Soumya Shetty: My name is Soumya Shetty. I'm e-commerce application manager for Yamaha Motor Corporation.

Anand: I'm Anand here and I'm group manager for Yamaha Financial Services for data analytics.

We want to build the “One Yamaha” brand, and not only to the customers externally, but within Yamaha as well.

I would call “One Yamaha” as a movement rather than an initiative. Yamaha as a company is a great cross pollinator. We have a lot of people moving around, establishing all the skill sets and all their legacies in different business units. My goal is to establish a data intelligence platform. So we took that approach to see how we can bring synergies between different teams and set up this one unified platform as Yamaha. We did select IDMC as our one unified platform in line with the One Yamaha initiative because we see how different systems, different data sets, different sources of data can talk to each other and we can bring this into this unified platform.

The plan for us is to really grow our middleware and standardize that across the organization, making an enterprise-wide solution. We had different reasons to transition to the cloud, digital transformation being one of them. The way Informatica has moved forward with cloud and IPU, it's been an easy transition to that and how we can really leverage IPU and take advantage of different modules within that. So it's been a great transition.

Informatica not only helps us with the data integration, but also the goal is to use Informatica to do application integration, data cataloging, and all the other cool stuff that we have with that platform.

There is very little initial investments required in terms of the infrastructure and setting up. So it really gives us a scalable solution, which can be scaled up and down based on business requirements.

And these are the kind of examples why we want to go to the cloud on why we want to partner with companies like that and bring products in that allow us to be more flexible and really speed to market so that we can really push the One Yamaha initiative throughout the company.

In my recent project, we used IDMC to make it a real-time flow. The positive business outputs for this project was great customer experience. We had less order cancellations as we moved from a complete batch to a real-time processing.

The fact that we could implement Informatica Cloud within two months and set that up for all the real-time order taking from the front end to the backend systems was amazing.

It was a no-brainer for us to move on to the cloud ecosystem. From a financial services standpoint, when you have an application, when you have a person coming in to buy a bike, the whole goal is to get his experience with the dealer as quick as possible to get him into that product. So having this one platform, easy access to data, quick access to data, helps our dealers, our business units, to get that done quicker, help us establish the brand value that we already have. So with IDMC, we are integrating data and applications to give the right tools and the right data to the right people at the right time to make right decisions. Our motto is “Rev Your Heart.” The data at the end of the day is revving the customer's heart and bringing him to life.

“We selected IDMC as our unified platform to bring multiple systems, datasets and data sources together to help our business units communicate more effectively to deliver products and services to customers faster.”

Anand Sivaramakrishnan

Group Data & Analytics Leader, Yamaha Financial Services
A global movement powered by data

A global movement powered by data

Yamaha has been making noise in the worlds of motorsports, watersports and professional racing for more than 70 years, earning a loyal following of drivers, riders and enthusiasts alike. The company’s impressive market share is a testament to their success, and it has no intention of slowing down.

Recognizing the need to standardize its business processes and unify its data globally, Yamaha embarked on an enterprise-wide modernization journey.

Under the banner of “One Yamaha,” this movement has encouraged the business to centralize all its data and analytics onto a unified cloud-native platform. In turn, real-time access to crucial business insights has led to more efficient processes for Yamaha’s dealers, better experiences for customers and improved collaboration among its internal business units.

To help ensure the success of its modernization initiative, Yamaha chose Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) as the foundation of its unified data management platform. In addition to democratizing data access across its organization, the cloud-native platform allows Yamaha to quickly scale its operations to support dynamic data intelligence workloads.

“We embraced the “One Yamaha” approach, joining forces with Informatica to create synergies between our many teams and business units,” explains Anand Sivaramakrishnan, Group Data & Analytics Leader for Yamaha Financial Services. “We selected IDMC as our unified platform to bring multiple systems, datasets and data sources together to help our business units communicate more effectively and to deliver products and services to customers faster.”

“The IPU pricing model has given us room to grow and be more flexible in the future, allowing us to test new applications and address different use cases with ease. The fact that we can take advantage of so many modules within the IDMC platform has made our transition to the cloud even more rewarding.”

Moninder Manic

Senior Manager, Yamaha Motor

Modernizing business intelligence & operations

To bring “One Yamaha” to life, the company needed to accelerate its decision-making by engaging and driving collaboration among its global business units. In practice, that meant eliminating legacy data siloes between its teams and the countless data streams that Yamaha uses to accelerate its business intelligence and decision-making.

With IDMC, Yamaha was able to modernize and elevate its data management environment into a true enterprise-wide solution.

Modernizing business intelligence & operations

The initial investment was small in terms of the infrastructure and initial setup, which allows Yamaha to scale up or downsize based on business requirements.

What’s more, the company was able to implement IDMC and integrate the platform with its critical back-end systems in just two months. This rapid roll-out set the pace for a new phase in Yamaha’s modernization journey.

“Digital transformation was a driving force in our journey to the cloud and Informatica has helped us realize all the benefits we hoped to achieve with our modernization journey — from improved scalability to reduced overhead and maintenance costs,” says Moninder Manic, Senior Manager at Yamaha.

Additionally, the Informatica Pricing Unit (IPU) model empowers Yamaha with newfound flexibility in how it consumes and scales its data management capabilities. The company can now access all Informatica’s Intelligent cloud services, from Cloud Data Ingestion and Replication to Cloud data Quality, using the same IDMC credits.

“The IPU pricing model has given us room to grow and be more flexible in the future, allowing us to test new applications and onboard different use cases with ease,” adds Manic. “The fact that we can take advantage of so many modules within the IDMC platform has made our transition to the cloud even more rewarding.”

Revving up the customer experience in real-time

Revving up the customer experience in real-time

As an increasingly important sales channel for Yamaha, e-commerce is a top priority for the company. Even customers that visit its dealerships may choose to fulfill their orders online, which adds layers of complexity to Yamaha’s order and fulfillment operations.

Yamaha previously used an e-commerce application that relied on batch processing to fill orders. According to Ecommerce Applications Manager, Soumya Shetty, the software had become too slow and cumbersome to support a modern e-commerce operation.

With IDMC, Yamaha not only replaced these batch processes with real-time data flows, it also was able to integrate data streams across inventory, ordering processing and fulfillment in real time to serve customers better.

“The move from batch to real-time data processing had a profound effect on our e-commerce operations. By reducing errors in our fulfillment, we improved our customer experience and had fewer cancelled orders,” says Shetty.

As for Yamaha’s brick and mortar sales channels, the company’s dealers are operating more efficiently than ever and the company has realized faster time to value. Sivaramakrisnan illustrates how rapid access to data via IDMC has accelerated financial processes across Yamaha’s dealer network.

“When a customer walks into a dealership to test a motorcycle, we want to get them in the driver’s seat as quickly as possible,” he says. “Informatica makes it easy for our dealers to access critical financial data and streamline the sales process, which in turn simplifies the purchasing experience for our customers and reinforces Yamaha’s brand value.”

Democratizing data and accelerating insights

In addition to unifying its data, Yamaha also brought all its analytics onto a comprehensive, unified, cloud-native IDMC platform, increasing operating efficiencies and empowering internal stakeholders to better serve their customers using a single intelligence platform. That includes Yamaha’s financial services operation, whose IT environment leverages AWS cloud, Snowflake as its cloud data warehouse, and the joint power of Snowflake and Sigma for business intelligence.

Democratizing data and accelerating insights

The native integration between Informatica and Snowflake — particularly the way data is optimized as it is pushed from one platform to the other with Informatica’s push down optimization capability, SQL ELT (formerly known as Advanced Push Down Optimization (APDO) — was a major driver in Yamaha’s decision to adopt IDMC as the data platform to underpin the “One Yamaha” initiative. By unlocking the full power of its data and insights, Yamaha has turned data uncertainty into clarity, helping teams to align their data strategies with business priorities.

From faster IT processes to efficiency in the way teams manage data workloads, the company has improved performance and accelerated decision-making across the board. Self-service access to trusted business insights empowers Yamaha’s employees to better understand the drivers behind their decision-making, which leads to successful outcomes for their teams and customers alike.

Focused on the road ahead

Focused on the road ahead

From its back-end operations to front-line customer experiences, the enhancements Yamaha has made with IDMC promise to make the organization more data-driven as it races ahead with its One Yamaha initiative.

“Our cloud journey is about modernization and partnering with companies that make us more flexible so we can accelerate our time to market,” says Manic. “Informatica helps us leverage, transform and orchestrate our data faster than ever so we can realize the One Yamaha vision across our organization.“

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