Background

Honda Motors is a global manufacturing lead with business lines spanning from its core automobiles and motorcycles to power generators and garden equipment. 

With a product range this broad, master data frequently becomes siloed within individual divisions, creating a lack of alignment across the enterprise that leads to inefficiencies and errors. 

Honda Motors' finance transformation department depends on data sources from these different divisions and business lines to monitor changes in regulations and technologies and identify business opportunities. 

But with almost every product line using a different solution to manage data, the integrity of that data is easily compromised, which then calls into question the trustworthiness of the organization's analytics and business intelligence. 

With the deprecation of Oracle Hyperion EPMA on the horizon, Olivier Hoffman, manager of both finance transformation and Oracle EPM for Honda Motors Europe, decided the time was right to seek out a master data management solution that would provide a single source of truth, or golden record, for Honda Motors' complex environment. 

The Problem

Oracle EPM makes master data management inefficient, error-prone, and unreliable.

As an Oracle EPM shop, the Honda Motors finance transformation team had been battling inefficient master data management processes for years. 

They relied on manual change management processes that were not only inefficient and error-prone, but also lacked the controls and validations needed to maintain the integrity of the master data in such a large and complex organization. 

Every change request involved a lot of back and forth between approvals, testing, and validations, which was frustrating for the end users who had to wait indefinitely for even a simple change request to make its way through this highly inefficient workflow. 

In addition, the lack of automated validation allowed frequent mistakes and inconsistencies to be introduced into the metadata through misinterpreted requests and simple human error. 

The Solution

EPMware’s out-of-the-box integrations immediately improve Honda Motors' master data management processes.

As Olivier began to search for a MDM replacement for Oracle EPM, the finance transformation team defined several requirements for the new solution that would directly address their primary challenges: 

	Support self-service, business-user-friendly master data maintenance.
	Increase governance and controls.
	Minimize downtime and failures.
	Reduce effort.
	Improve service level agreement.

The team evaluated SAP MDG, which seemed like a logical fit as they already used SAP as their main ERP platform, as well as similar Oracle solutions. 

Honda Motors concluded that, neither SAP MDG nor the Oracle alternatives aligned with Honda's requirements, as these solutions were more expensive and more complex than what the finance transformation department needed to achieve its goals. 

After demoing EPMware at an industry event in London, Honda Motors fully evaluated EPMware's unified master data management and data governance platform and found that EPMware had the level of features, user experience, and ease of use it was looking for to overcome it's master data management challenges. 

The Honda team was specifically lookinf for a solutions that wouldn't require a lot of customization and development prior to implementation. EPMware's out-of-the-box integrations and competitive pricing helped seal the deal. 

The Results

EPMware delivers accurate, trustworthy master data to Honda's complex enterprise environments.

Prior to implementing EPMware, Honda Motors' finance transformation team struggled with a lack of validations, which had a significant impact on the accuracy and consistency of the organization's data across its many product lines. 

EPMware helped Honda Motors solve its MDM and metadata quality challenges by automating the original manual validation process and configuring property validations to require attributes to be populated for base-level members. 

Today, EPMware further reduces the amount of validations required by the application administration team by running many similar property level validations in real time, while master data is authored by the user requesting the change. 

In an enterprise as large and complex as Honda Motors, compromising on data quality isn't an option. This imperative to maintain data integrity and accuracy led Honda Motors' finance transformation team to seek out a master data management solution that could provide a single source of truth for analytics and intelligence across the organization's highly complex product ecosystem. 

When Oracle's master data management solutions weren't up to the challenge, Honda traded its inefficient manual change request processes for EPMware's automated workflows, real-time validations, and one-click push metadata deployment. This results in immediate improvements to the finance transformation team's request management workflows.