IBM Signs Five-Year Agreement with Honda Motor Europe Ltd to Integrate and Manage Its Finance and Procurement Operations
October 06, 2021 at 12:03 am EDT
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IBM and Honda Motor Europe announced a five-year agreement under which IBM plans to manage and run Honda's finance and procurement operations across Europe. The contract is designed to deliver integrated end-to-end service which can help Honda improve efficiency, reduce costs, standardise processes across its European operations and ultimately set it on course to a "Zero Touch" vision. The contract extends an existing ten-year relationship by giving IBM Global Business Services additional responsibility for procurement operations. The fully integrated finance and procurement intelligent workflow is designed to help enable cost savings, productivity improvements and improved service levels to Honda's suppliers and customers, on a resilient platform. This agreement comes at a time when the automotive industry is embarking on a radical transformation to a connected, autonomous, shared, and electrified world. The transformation investments required put even greater demands on back-office functions to improve efficiencies and be flexible to support the changing business demands. Under the agreement IBM plans to manage the Source-to-Pay, Record-to-Report and Order-to-Cash processes. The standardisation and simplification of the processes is designed to enable the application of the latest advances in automation which can provide further cost and quality benefits. A new single helpdesk with an integrated view of the entire finance and procurement function can not only be more efficient but can also improve customer service.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is one of the world's leading computer services companies. Net sales break down by activity as follows:
- cognitive solutions and transaction processing software development (41.4%);
- IT services (31.6%): consulting (management of logistic chains, financial performance, CRM, human resources, etc.), application management, systems integration, cloud computing, hosting, technical support services, etc.;
- sale of IT infrastructure (25.3%): hybrid IT infrastructure solutions, microcomputers, servers, peripheral devices, networks, data storage equipment, etc.;
- financing of computer equipment (1%);
- other (0.7%).
Net sales are distributed geographically as follows: the United States (41.5%), Americas (9.8%), Europe/Middle East/Africa (29.7%), Japan (9%) and Asia/Pacific (10%).