CSI Solar: Winning global competition with heightened quality control through industry value chain traceability
SAP BTP enables CSI Solar’s photovoltaics traceability
A global leader in photovoltaics, CSI Solar Ltd took advantage of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to establish a comprehensive industry traceability system. With robust quality assurance and control through tracing raw materials, manufacturing processes, and the origins of every solar panel, CSI Solar shines in a highly competitive market.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Industrial manufacturing | Suzhou, China | 18,500 employees |
needed to trace the industry value chain.
data points for one full container load analyzed in seconds.
IT Director, CSI Solar Ltd
Responding to the management challenges of a global footprint
A global leader in the photovoltaic sector, CSI Solar Ltd engages in solar module and battery storage manufacturing and the provision of related engineering, procurement, and construction services. Since 2001, the company has accumulated a total delivery of 90 GW, ranking among the top five solar photovoltaic product and energy solution providers worldwide.
In recent years, CSI Solar has seen a deepening globalization of the photovoltaic supply chain. In its organization, its sales subsidiaries and production bases have spread across 23 countries and regions on six continents. Inventory management involves managing its own warehouses, third-party warehouses, as well as ocean-bound and customs-cleared inventory. Over time as more branches were established, coupled with increased complexity from various regional customs procedures, CSI Solar’s management challenges also grew.
At the same time, market competition in the photovoltaic sector intensified. The product warranty period was extended from 10 years to 25 years. Trade frictions and stricter intellectual property regulations also called for higher visibility and granularity of management oversight and reporting.
Achieving industry value chain visibility through data integration
CSI Solar’s long-standing collaboration with SAP spans more than a decade. As the company expanded its operations globally, it became increasingly urgent to adopt an enterprise-level technology foundation to support multilingual operations, diverse accounting standards, and regional compliance requirements. With only a few enterprise-level software solutions able to simultaneously meet this criteria, CSI Solar renewed its partnership with SAP.
The company valued the powerful data integration capabilities and extensive analytical functionality offered by SAP Integration Suite. With this suite of cloud services that run on SAP BTP, CSI Solar is able to access and integrate product data from various countries, platforms, and systems throughout the product lifecycle. This creates a foundation for globally unified decision-making and analysis.
Using the SAP BW/4HANA solution to support advanced data warehousing, CSI Solar can enable global data governance. Previously, different regions operated with diverse data rules, resulting in the business team needing to make manual adjustments and multiple aggregations. Now, with unified data rules, business units can work without recalibrating data, enabling real-time inventory monitoring. This allows it to respond to rapid changes in photovoltaic supply and demand, perform financial cost analysis to assess profits and losses in various locations, and automate industry value chain analysis to optimize operational execution. The improvements brought by data governance and industry value chain tracking are tangible, visible, and quantifiable.
At the forefront of operational analysis, CSI Solar utilizes the SAP Analytics Cloud solution to enable data visualization, freeing up business analysts from tedious tasks such as data tabulation and extraction. This allows them to focus on business analysis, identify breakthrough points for optimizing the industry value chain, and provide the management team with valuable insights.
IT Director, CSI Solar Ltd
Leveraging data for agile responses to market changes
Today, CSI Solar has successfully achieved full industry chain product traceability and analysis through the unified data integration and analytical capabilities of SAP BTP. A comprehensive product lifecycle management system now runs throughout the industry value chain.
On the manufacturing end, by tracing every step from product to semifinished goods and raw materials through production orders, process routes, and serial numbers, CSI Solar has enhanced product quality control. In the event of customer complaints or quality recalls, specific product batches can be quickly identified to avoid large-scale production halts and improve operational efficiency.
On the delivery end, real-time visualization of container numbers, delivery order numbers, shipping order numbers, and batch numbers allows accurate tracking of product warehousing, distribution, logistics, and terminal processes. With this information, the team can identify sales process bottlenecks and enhance market responsiveness.
Currently, CSI Solar is accelerating its cloud migration journey with proven expertise from SAP Services and Support. Looking ahead, the company intends to further leverage the powerful capabilities of SAP BTP to analyze the carbon footprint of the industry value chain, helping contribute to net-zero commitments.