How Honda’s Finance Transformation Team Drives Improvements to Enterprise Master Data Management

As a global leader in the manufacturing of automobiles, motorcycles, and power equipment, Honda’s finance transformation department depends on data sourced from many different divisions and business lines. 

Because the company produces a broad range of products, it’s easy for master data to be siloed within these divisions. This creates a lack of alignment across the organization.

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Olivier Hoffman, manager of Honda Europe’s finance transformation department, to talk about some of the master data management (MDM) challenges his team has overcome and why creating a “golden record” is key in a complex enterprise environment.

Manual request processes increase errors and inconsistencies.

Honda’s finance transformation team oversees the company’s transformation programs and projects. This involves monitoring changes in regulations and technologies and identifying the opportunities these changes offer.

Olivier, who is also the finance transformation department's Oracle EPM manager, said the company struggled to manage its master data effectively using the EPM platform.

According to Olivier, their change request process was inefficient, error-prone, and lacked the controls needed to ensure the integrity of Honda’s master data.

“We had a manual process for a number of years,” Olivier explained. “You had to raise a request, then it had to be approved by somebody, and then the request needed to be tested and validated. It was a lot of back and forth.”

This process was time-consuming and frustrating for end users who had to wait while a seemingly straightforward change request made its way through a highly inefficient workflow.

With no controls in place to validate changes, the process frequently introduced mistakes and inconsistencies into the metadata through misinterpreted requests and simple human error.

Siloed business systems prevent master data alignment.

Each business solution within Honda was using its own solution to manage its data. With accurate data becoming increasingly vital to business analytics and intelligence, and the looming deprecation of Oracle Hyperion EPMA, Olivier decided the time was right to seek out a more efficient MDM solution that would create a single source of truth—or golden record—for all of Honda’s master data.

“Many of our applications just manage the data their own way, for their own needs,” Olivier said. “So, the long-term solution for us is to come with one solution [sic], not only for that situation, but for all of the use cases within Honda.” 

Out-of-the-box integrations provide instant master data improvements.

Olivier defined several requirements for the new MDM solution, including:

• Self-service, business-user-friendly master data maintenance 

• Improved service level agreement (SLA)

• Increased governance and controls

• Reduced effort

• Minimized downtime and failures

Because they already used SAP as their main ERP platform, Olivier evaluated SAP MDG as a replacement for Hyperion EPM. However, he concluded that both SAP MDG and similar Oracle solutions were more expensive and more complex than they needed to be to achieve their goals.

Olivier discovered EPMware at an industry event in London, and after going through the evaluation process he determined that EPMware had the features needed to help Honda’s finance transformation team overcome their master data management challenges.

“The idea was not to do a lot of customizing and development, and EPMware is close to a turnkey solution,” Olivier said. “There was a minimal amount of configuration and the cost was low enough to make a business case to use it to solve a short- to medium-term problem.”

Olivier also noted that EPMware met their user experience and ease-of-use requirements.

“Really, the idea was to remove the workload from the IS team and the offshore team and to come up with a tool that an end user who is not a technical specialist could operate,” he said. “I'm not getting any escalation from end users anymore, which I used to get a lot.”

Although he didn’t provide specific metrics, Olivier did share that the team noticed immediate improvements to their request management workflows.

“I can say that the process is a lot more robust than it used to be. We have a lot of installations built into EPMware, plus approvals and automated deployment to the test environment to make sure that it's doing what it's supposed to do.

Master data management is key in complex enterprise environments.

In a business environment as complex as Honda’s, a rock-solid MDM strategy is essential for maintaining the quality and integrity of the data used for analytics and intelligence.

EPMware helped Honda transform its MDM processes by replacing inefficient manual tasks with automation at several strategic points in the change request management process.

For example, Honda now uses EPMware’s ERP Import interface to detect deltas from inbound master data and automatically create an enriched metadata request; this request is ready for data stewards and owners to further enrich and pass on for workflow review and approvals in EPMware.

Honda also uses EPMware REST APIs to source master data, eliminating the need for manual file-based uploads. Similar REST APIs are also used to provide custom metadata views to downstream data warehouse applications.

Additionally, EPMware’s multi-environment deployment feature enables Honda to easily publish master data in one workflow—first to a UAT environment and subsequently to a production environment. This ability to programmatically deploy the same metadata to UAT and production is huge, as it allows Honda to keep UAT and production in sync—as well as easily test the data integrity of master data changes.

EPMware helped Honda solve one of its biggest MDM and metadata quality challenges by configuring property validations to require attributes to be populated for base-level members. This was originally a manual validation process, and errors and inconsistencies weren’t always caught in time, creating reporting discrepancies. Now, EPMware runs many similar property level validations in real-time, while master data is authored by the user requesting the change. This reduces the amount of validation required by the application administration team.

Want to learn more about MDM? Download “A Practical Guide to the Master Data Management Process” now.