Yamaha revolutionizes its business data analysis with IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator

The Yamaha Corporation (‘Yamaha’) has developed a wide range of businesses worldwide, from musical instruments to electronics equipment, starting with the establishment of Yamaha de México, S.A. de C.V. in 1958, through Yamaha International Corporation in 1960 (now Yamaha Corporation of America) and going on to set up Yamaha Europa GmbH in Germany in 1966.

Customer requirements: to analyze daily changing data
Under its new medium-term business plan for April 2007 to March 2010, Yamaha has launched a wide range of businesses worldwide, from musical instruments such as pianos and Electones to electronics equipment. The company has also been aggressively concentrating management resources in specific areas in order to achieve continued growth. This has made it vital for Yamaha to be able to visualize business information at the global level.

Yusuke Ikawa, Assistant General Manager of Yamaha’s Information Systems Division, explains that operational divisions made the following request of the company’s IT systems: “The Business Planning Division came up with a request that they should be able to analyze daily sales and inventory data to help them make reports for submission to the operational divisions,” says Mr. Ikawa. “I realized that this would require an enterprise business warehouse across the company, because information such as sales and inventory would need to be analyzed from all different angles.”

Yamaha, which introduced SAP ERP as early as 2000 for its core operations in Japan – inventory management and sales management – had also adopted SAP Business Information Warehouse, an earlier version of SAP NetWeaver BW, in 2001. However, with some areas of the company still using legacy systems, while overseas sales companies ran their own business systems, it could not be said that Yamaha as a whole had achieved an integrated IT system.

Yamaha decided to define uniform product codes worldwide (‘Global Material Codes’, or GMC) to standardize operations and unify data throughout the company, and then upgrade to the latest version of SAP NetWeaver BW, running on IBM System x3650 servers and connected to a storage area network based around IBM System Storage DS6000 hardware. With this solution, Yamaha enabled ‘Global BW’ – analysis of data from across the global enterprise, standardized in GMC units.

However, only business divisions that required specific regular analyses used the Global BW process because it was extremely time-consuming, using as many as 70 million data items for its analysis. And even users in the departments that actually carried out analysis did not use it to analyze daily information, because they knew how slow response time was.

Mr. Ikawa comments: “Analysis is a function that only becomes valuable when you use it. Essentially, effective analysis is only achieved by trial and error, to see what angles you should look at the data from, and what ways of using it are most efficient. Many of our employees hesitated to use Global BW because it took a long time to return a response. There is no point in just having the system if you don’t use it.”

Yamaha therefore decided to introduce SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, an analytical engine that increases data retrieval efficiency, in order to accelerate analysis using SAP NetWeaver BW.

Adoption: performance improved without reconfiguring SAP NetWeaver BW
SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator is an analysis engine that can be added to existing systems to improve performance, without the need for software tuning or any other reconfiguration of SAP NetWeaver BW. Through its adoption, Yamaha has accelerated its data analysis, without making any significant modifications to the Global BW system already in place.

The IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator that Yamaha has introduced consists of an IBM BladeCenter chassis with IBM HS21 blade servers and an IBM System Storage DS4700 storage system, which are used to maximize the performance and scalability of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, leveraging advanced software technology such as the IBM General Parallel File System and the SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator software.

The 64-bit Intel Xeon CPUs in the IBM BladeCenter allow the system to address over 4GB of either virtual or physical memory, which means that all data can be stored in main memory, which leads to enhanced performance.

Masaya Shigeno, of the Information Systems Support Center’s ICT Service Group in Yamaha’s Information Systems Division, mentions IBM’s technological capabilities and previous successes as reasons for choosing IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator.

“I think the people at IBM are very good at gathering requirements and planning the implementation of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator,” says Mr. Shigeno. “Even if we do have a problem, I am confident that IBM will be able to work with SAP to find a solution, which is reassuring. We also deal with IBM for SAP Basis support, and the quality of their technical skills has always been of great help to us.”

Support in implementing SAP NetWeaver BW and SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator was also provided by an IBM Business Partner, Hitachi Business International Ltd. Narumi Adachi, Manager of the Information Systems Support Center’s Systems Development Group in Yamaha’s Information Systems Division has this to say about the relationship with Hitachi Business International:

“We have been dealing with Hitachi Business International since we first adopted business warehouse tools from SAP, and we had no qualms about this latest project. We were also happy to leave the coordination to IBM, as everything went very smoothly.”

Effects of implementation: broader range of users performing data analysis
“The implementation of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator has resulted in a dramatic improvement in Global BW performance, with all queries running at least 15 times faster than before,” says Mr. Ikawa. “In some cases, queries can be processed as much as 260 times as fast.”

Even the most common and demanding queries, such as those used in sales/gross margin/inventory reports, are completed around 20 times faster now. This improvement in performance has elicited an immediate reaction from users.

“We knew that performance would improve, but we were surprised because the response was much better than we had anticipated,” says Mr. Ikawa. “Less than one week after adoption, the feedback from users in the Business Planning Division was: ‘It’s really fast.’ SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator has finally allowed users themselves to benefit from SAP ERP by giving them the ability to see information in real time.”

This improvement in performance has even affected users in operational divisions that had not previously been involved with data analysis.

“Up to now, only departments that were closely involved in management used Global BW, but now people have started to use it in all sorts of places, such as product planning,” says Ms. Adachi. “Users have started spontaneously teaching each other how to use it, and exchanging information on what sort of analysis they use it for.”

Future developments: revolutionizing the way business is done
Because of the improved performance in data analysis, Yamaha’s Information Systems Division has begun receiving requests such as ‘Can’t we look at the information from this angle?’ or ‘Can’t we use it in such and such a way?’

“We needed these requests in order to enhance analysis functions,” says Mr. Ikawa. “It’s fair to say that with the introduction of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, we are revolutionizing the way we do business from the ground up.”

There are many parts of the company worldwide that have still not adopted SAP ERP, and for business areas still using legacy systems, information can sometimes only be updated monthly. Yamaha therefore intends to go ahead with further adoption of SAP ERP throughout the company, and increase the accuracy of the information it analyses.

“Replacing systems throughout the company with SAP ERP will allow us to obtain up-to-date information on a daily basis,” concludes Mr. Ikawa. “The final challenge is how to present this information to managers. We will likely discover by trial and error whether it is better to have a system for displaying it in real time, like an information cockpit, or whether another method of presentation will be better.”