From Disconnected to Autonomous: Daikin’s People-Centric ERP Transformation
Daikin’s story is about more than just an overdue technology upgrade. The company’s end goal was anchored around the employees and end customers: How can we make day-to-day experiences smarter, faster, and more intuitive while still building for the future?
To answer this question, EY and SAP moved to one cloud ERP that enabled a unified, intelligent enterprise while reducing complexity and empowering people.
Starting point at Daikin
At the forefront of the story was the goal of being the global leader in the HVAC industry. As a result, Daikin pioneered groundbreaking technologies that revolutionized commercial AC. With a longstanding history of over 100 years of engineering, the company has grown to operate globally in more than 170 countries with over 100,000 employees. However, its journey to global recognition was peppered with growing pains.
Disconnected systems led to complexity
Years of rapid growth alongside acquisitions left the company with a legacy ERP that was fragmented, inconsistent, and lacked the standardization required to operate efficiently. Multiple disconnected systems and workflows meant that employees were dealing with a myriad of processes, all differing depending on which business unit they were working with. This increase in manual work and confusion around processes added avoidable complexity to day-to-day tasks, as employees spent more time than necessary solving for problems.
Together, EY and SAP teams worked toward an end goal by posing the question: how do we simplify operations, empower employees, and drive customer experience? Daikin’s industry is unique, with highly distributed networks and complex supply chains. Companies operating in this environment must continuously adapt to industry standards and regulations, all while delivering the reliable product experience they’re known for. Daikin turned to EY and SAP because the company needed a partnership that understood the nuances of the industry within which it operates.
Daikin’s focus from the beginning was on the people who would be impacted most by this transformation and ensuring that their everyday experience evolved into one that is simpler, consistent, and productive. With AI at the core, Daikin can look to the future and see one unified system where AI moves beyond isolated cases and becomes embedded end-to-end.
To achieve this vision, Daikin established SAP Cloud ERP as its digital core and single source of truth. Going live in just 10 months, the pilot modernized finance, logistics, procurement, and sales workflows for more than 300 frontline users, demonstrating early results of 10% improved counter efficiency and a 20% faster financial close.
EY’s industry expertise paired with SAP technology helped ensure that the people who use the technology every day no longer log-in to multiple systems and customers get the right product at the right time and price.
Employees gained single-screen experiences, faster access to information, reduced manual effort, simplified training and onboarding, and more confidence in decision-making. Dealers gained better visibility, faster onboarding experiences, and more consistent service interactions.
Journey to an Autonomous Enterprise
Now, Daikin doesn’t have to worry about which inefficiencies it will have to confront for an approaching launch.
The early results demonstrate what’s possible when AI-driven insights are paired with human-centered delivery: improved efficiency, faster financial close, better data governance, enhanced forecasting and operational decision making, and accelerated delivery using AI-assisted implementation capabilities.
This not only empowers end users but creates a scalable foundation that can grow alongside Daikin. With over 400 branches worldwide, EY and SAP created a blueprint for Daikin’s global transformation with future automation and intelligent decision-making in mind.
