Lion Corporation automates SAP data integration to power digital transformation

Lion Corporation, a leading Japanese multinational in consumer healthcare products, is accelerating a company-wide digital transformation in order to fulfill its mission of making a difference in everyday lives by redesigning habits.

For many years, the company prioritized the stable operation of legacy on-premises data centers. This eventually resulted in data fragmentation and siloing across departmental systems such as SAP, Salesforce, and various CRM tools. Each department manually extracted data and processed it in Excel to create reports, resulting in significant time lags before the data reached management and hindering rapid decision-making for marketing, finance, and operations.

Lion couldn’t afford to risk missing opportunities in a rapidly evolving market. The business needed a scalable, automated solution to seamlessly integrate its SAP data into an analytics destination.

Ichiro Tsuchitani of the Digital Strategy Department reflects:

"In the past, we spent a significant amount of budget and time on ‘defensive IT’—system maintenance and operation. However, to drive digital transformation for our business, we needed to shift our cost structure and mindset toward ‘offensive IT,’ building a large-scale data lake in the cloud and using it as a starting point for data utilization."

Building a data infrastructure without specialized data engineers

To shift their team’s IT posture from “defensive” to “offensive,” Lion couldn’t build the data infrastructure in-house, especially since the company had no specialized data engineers. The solution Lion adopted was a data infrastructure centered on Google BigQuery, with Fivetran serving as the pipeline. The key factors tipping the decision in favor of Fivetran were the availability of a quality SAP-specific connector and the extremely rapid deployment speed.

"Compared to traditional integration methods, which typically require extensive development timelines and costs for SAP data, Fivetran allowed us to complete the initial synchronization of SAP verification data just one week after the network was opened. This speed became the engine that accelerated our digital transformation."
 — Ichiro Tsuchitani, Digital Strategy Department

Because Fivetran is fully managed, it automates maintenance tasks, including API changes and error handling. This enabled Lion to concentrate its resources on data utilization and creating business value, which should be the primary focus.

Although the rapid synchronization of large-scale SAP data increased Fivetran usage beyond initial expectations, Lion was able to reduce Google Cloud operational costs significantly. The reduction in development and operational overhead helped improve the overall cost efficiency of the data platform.

Helping executives access real-time information firsthand

The impact of introducing Fivetran goes beyond reducing the hours spent manually extracting data and assembling reports. The greatest change has been in how management interacts with data. Previously, executives relied on static, manually processed reports from business departments. Now, they can directly access fresh information through tools like Looker. Executives now check dashboards themselves and engage in data-driven discussions. Executives are increasingly making data-driven management decisions.

Toward AI utilization and customer-facing services

With a solid data foundation, Lion Corporation aims for further business transformation through data integration.

"Moving forward, we will promote data democratization, where necessary data and reports can be obtained simply by asking via natural language using generative AI. By creating an environment where employees without specialized knowledge can freely use data, we will raise the level of data utilization capabilities across the entire company." 
 — Ichiro Tsuchitani, Digital Strategy Department

Lion is currently pursuing initiatives to optimize the supply chain by combining SAP and core system data with external data, and to personalize marketing using web and unstructured data. The company plans to expand beyond product manufacturing into experiences and services in fields such as oral care. 

Lion’s new data foundation, produced with Fivetran and Google Cloud, supports its continuing mission as a next-generation provider of healthcare goods.

For this case study in Japanese, look here. 

[CTA_MODULE]