World's largest premium tires and auto parts manufacturer.
Bridgestone is a global leader in premium tire manufacturing, based out of Japan. Bridgestone is transforming the way world runs (world literally runs on their tires). They are revolutionizing not only their product, but also the way they operate. Bridgestone very much believes in being organized, and that's the reason they adapted to the Cloud based management tools like SAP, to manage their daily EDI operations in a much more efficient and mannerful way which ultimately will make lives of their business partners, vendors and customers easy. SAP Cloud Platform Integration is the most advanced technology to support EDI operations. SAP CPI is a cloud based middleware that connects all the customers, vendors and partners to a centralized management system called ERP. Ozed was directly associated with the Zaventem, Belgium headquarters which is responsible for entire European region's operations.
Bridgestone operates entirely on cloud, which makes everything easier for end users, but it could create many challenges for IT team if not handled by experienced and knowledgeable people. Bridgestone had plans to migrate all their systems to a newer version to keep their business operations smoother than ever. This entire transition was named RYoga which had an estimated overall cost of 300 Million Euros. Ozed reached out to them and explained how we could help them with one of the many modules of SAP, PI/CPI. Rest is the history.
Bridgestone has a large network of vendors and customers. Almost all the major automotive brands are running on Bridgestone tires, including mighty VW group (ŠKODA, SEAT, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche), Daimler group (Mercedes, AMG and Benz), Volvo and many others. SAP-CPI is the only module which bears the load of almost all the communications. From sending thousands of invoices worth millions of Euros to providing latest status of shipping containers roaming around the Atlantic, From managing inquiries to new implementation of the online ordering portal called Tyrelink2.0. We had to be on the right spot, almost every single day. We didn't only have to provide support to ensure daily operations are not impacted, but also had to provide the enhancements and implement new ideas to increase the efficiency.
Handoff was supposed to be done within 3 months when the previous team, handling all the things, would be providing us the bigger picture of the system. We had to be familiar with the system and interfaces so that we could support all the operations. After the handoff, old team was not supposed to be working, and it was only Ozed. It was entirely Ozed's responsibly after that, so we had to be fluent and grasp the knowledge by heart. For the next three months we studied their entire system and understood all the interfaces for different vendors and customers. In July 2020 we got the access to entire internal system and started implementation and providing the support.
Iteration was out of the picture here because iterations happen over some fixed weeks or months, but here the handshake was continuous. Daily we had tons of calls on different occurring issues and our job was to fix the fixable or implement new solution in case it's not fixable. A constant, endless cycle, but we took that as a challenge and right away started fixing things.
Ozed was responsible for multiple new implementations of such interfaces. One of the biggest such implementation was of BMW. BMW is one of the Bridgestone's largest customer, and they were migrating their EDI formats to newer versions (4913 to 4984) and the task was to create new solutions so that Bridgestone's system could handle such EDIs in new format. In simple words, this was an upgrade. We were directly put into contact with BMW's IT team for the knowledge transfer and requirements gathering. After the countless conferences with BMW's IT team and 4 exact months later, we delivered the upgrade and that too right before the scheduled date. This was the closest we came to the GoLive schedule, but this was nothing less than a thriller for us and we take immense proud sharing such inspiring cases. Apart from that, we also took part in the migration of Tyrelink1 to Tyrelink2. Tyrelink is the online ordering system where their registered vendors and customers can order tires. This was just one of the many such implementations Ozed took care of on behalf of Bridgestone.
We stood on our commitments for entire two years and this was a once in a lifetime experience working with such great organization and amazing people. After the GoLive of their major upgrade (RYoga), Bridgestone expanded their in-house IT team, and then it was time to bid farewell since they had their own capable IT team. The last task was to train their internal team on the Ozed handled system, by knowledge transfer sessions and documentations. It was a pleasure working with Bridgestone.
