Even the world’s biggest, most technologically advanced companies rely on Excel spreadsheets: planners and sales people don’t always want to break free from their tiny green cells. But what if you could leave sales people enjoying their spreadsheets or other “legacy” apps, while putting together a CRM system that pulls in the relevant data from them, as well as information from the myriad other systems an enterprise relies on?
That was the challenge facing Bala Krishnapillai, SVP & CIO at Hitachi America Ltd. The 110-year-old company has close to 573 group companies just within the Americas, and around 283,000 employees worldwide. Its operations range from energy infrastructure, including nuclear, and rail, to building systems, to consumer goods. And that’s before joint ventures.
With such a breadth of operations it’s almost inevitable that different units end up relying on different applications to manage sales and other operations. Moreover, acquisitions bring in other tooling. This can make it hard to build a common view within regions or even teams, never mind across borders or business units. And it makes it very hard to unify and prepare the data needed to exploit AI. A new approach was needed.
