For over 50 years, Yamaha Motor Corporation USA has designed and manufactured products and services in areas as diverse as motorcycles and motorcycle technology, outboard motors, robotics, golf carts, and drone technology. Facing rapid developments in the areas of electric vehicles and digital technologies, Yamaha Motors committed to restructuring traditional systems and frameworks as an important enabler of growth.
With a company-wide digital transformation initiative known as Yamaha Next Phase already in place, Yamaha Motors started mapping business process flows in key areas, as part of its global process design documentation.
Quickly realizing it could unlock more value by moving beyond documentation, Yamaha Motors sought a different approach. With the right solution, it could identify and plan process improvement opportunities and then share the plans with business users across the organization.
Before: Challenges and opportunities
- Overall lack of process visibility across the organization, leading to requests for unnecessary process changes, while suggested improvements and enhancements could not be implemented easily
- Communication challenges between business and IT on access to process information,including multiple business units making use of different process flows to achieve the same outcome
Why SAP
- SAP Signavio Process Manager solution to track and record process revisioning, compare previous “as-is” and “to-be” states, identify localized process variations, and see process evolution
- Access to the SAP Signavio Value Accelerators package to determine best-practice process flows
- SAP Signavio Process Governance solution to support engagement from business leaders and provide quick and easy approval workflows, enhancing overall trust in the process changes
After: Value-driven results
- Formalized an organization-wide effort to document business processes, enabling visibility and accessibility of process information for all, resulting in improved training and onboarding of new staff
- Enabled more effective and efficient process enhancement activities, including the capacity to roll out process changes smoothly across the entire organization, keep colleagues informed of new process steps and workflows, and foster a closer relationship between business leads and IT
- Readied the business to take next steps in implementing the SAP Signavio Process Intelligence solution and further integrating SAP LeanIX solutions
“It was a real ‘wow’ moment when we first saw SAP Signavio solutions. We immediately felt they would add a significant amount of value, not just for individual processes in key business areas but for the organization as a whole. I wish we’d had these solutions sooner.”
Chuck Bohannon, Senior Manager, SAP and Parts/Accessories, Yamaha Motor Corporation USA