Shimano Europe: Enhancing stakeholder relationships by building a future-proof and scalable system integration landscape
Explore Shimano’s journey with SAP
Shimano Europe B.V. manufactures quality cycling components, fishing tackle, and rowing equipment for these popular outdoor sports. Needing to harmonize a disparate system integration landscape, the company implemented SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Integration Suite. This reduced Shimano’s operational costs and improved customer experiences.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Consumer products | Eindhoven, Netherlands | 11,364 employees | Acorel B.V. |
cost avoidance by using SAP BTP for messaging between applications and processes.
new scalable APIs (in phase one).
faster customer onboarding thanks to SAP Integration Suite.
IT Application Architect, Shimano Europe B.V.
Modernizing the integration landscape to improve customer satisfaction
Established in 1921, Shimano continues to supply captivating products that help promote cycling, fishing, and rowing cultures. With sales offices and factories all over the world, the company had a complex IT environment with nonscalable, high-maintenance, and point-to-point integrations, as well as a lack of governance and adherence to standards. This made it difficult to gain real-time customer information, while the absence of monitoring meant the business couldn’t identify issues before they impacted customers. The processes of onboarding customers and providing them with order information weren’t timely, and the use of an external data broker to manage messaging wasn’t cost-effective.
To meet the ever-increasing demand to be customer-centric, Shimano wanted to enhance data security and reliability for better internal and external communications. The business looked to migrate its existing system integration landscape to an integration-platform-as-a-service solution that would meet its needs, including the ability to develop scalable and future-proof integrations as a prerequisite.
IT Application Architect, Shimano Europe B.V.
Reducing integration complexity to provide operational stability
The capabilities of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and SAP Integration Suite caught Shimano’s attention. The platform centralizes information and helps improve the security of data flows between its internal business processes and customers.
With SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology, Shimano explored a comprehensive framework that helps accelerate hybrid integration platform design, safeguard integration projects based on SAP best practices, and enable an agile integration practice across their organization.
The API Management capability within SAP Integration Suite allows Shimano to strengthen data reliability and implement features (such as policies and quotas) that apply to critical business processes, including order to cash. The Cloud Integration and API Management capabilities help create a reusable and scalable set of quick integrations that provide flexibility and operational stability to the business by using, among others, prepackaged integration content. Existing integrations can now be used in other projects, resulting in cost avoidance and time optimization. The Open Connectors capability enables Shimano to smoothly integrate SAP software with third-party systems, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, and Workday, within its sales, B2B, and end-to-end scenarios. Additionally, Shimano saves implementation time and effort by using the suite’s Integration Advisor capability with AI-enabled mapping proposals and prebuilt standard message formats. See the figure for the integration architecture.
The company used SAP Build solutions with its implementation partner, Acorel, to create a monitoring tool to better manage the performance of the integrations and business processes. It provides the IT team with insights into technical key metrics, such as message volume, errors, and trends, improving the management of Shimano’s comprehensive integration landscape. The business is exploring the possibility of deploying the SAP Build Process Automation solution on SAP BTP.
The strong synergy between Shimano and Acorel contributed to the project’s success. Their relationship is set to strengthen further, as the sports-product manufacturer plans to deploy more integrations and work on projects with SAP products that are already in the pipeline.
IT Application Architect, Shimano Europe B.V.
Making operations better, faster, and cheaper across the enterprise
For Shimano, the benefits of deploying SAP software are already evident. The onboarding time for new business customers has been halved from eight weeks to four weeks. Retailers now have real-time access to the information they need, such as stock and product details, with the APIs. This allows them to place their orders in a convenient one-stop shop. And by switching from an external broker for messaging to using SAP BTP, the company expects to achieve cost avoidance of about 97%.
Part of the reason Shimano opted for SAP BTP was to build on its existing portfolio of SAP applications, including SAP Customer Experience solutions. Moreover, the complete overhaul of its system integration landscape with SAP Integration Suite will help progressively reduce complexities over time and provide an IT environment free of siloed data.
Improving customer satisfaction is foremost in the company strategy. This doesn’t just apply when customers use their bikes, for example, but also when they interface and connect with Shimano on its platforms. The business can now count on future-proof and scalable integrations, as part of its digital assets, that can be used across the global operations to better serve customers.
IT Application Architect, Shimano Europe B.V.
Featured partner
Acorel specializes in using SAP BTP to drive successful customer outcomes, as demonstrated in projects like Shimano’s. By integrating healthy data flows and enabling smooth business services, Acorel adds value across the customer journey. Its expertise in the customer experience domain helps ensure that organizations not only complete projects successfully but also continuously enhance their operational efficiency and customer engagement, resulting in long-term business success. Acorel’s deep knowledge of SAP BTP helps streamline processes and fosters a more connected, data-driven, and integrated ecosystem.