IBM and Honda Motor Europe have continued their love-in with a new 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 a service so Honda can standardise processes across its European operations. It’s all part of Honda’s “Zero Touch” vision.
This new contract extends an existing 10-year relationship by giving IBM Global Business Services additional responsibility for procurement operations.
“We have a strategic need to transform our finance and procurement operations into the very best in the world and in so doing make Honda’s European operations a business that every dealer and supplier wants to work with,” says Joe Crump, general manager, Business Administration, Honda Motor Europe.
According to IBM, the automotive industry is up for transformation as it prepares for a “connected, autonomous, shared and electrified world”. This means firms will need to invest more into their back-office functions to deal with such demands.
Under the agreement IBM plans to manage the source-to-pay, record-to-report and order-to-cash processes. A new single helpdesk will provide an integrated view of the entire finance and procurement function.
IBM and Honda Motor Europe signed their Finance & Procurement Service agreement in 1Q 2021. The announcement was made public today (6 October).
Honda’s UK HQ is in Bracknell in Berkshire.
Away from the automotive world, IBM has unsurprisingly been busy.
Last month, it unveiled its new IBM Power E1080 server, the first in a new family of servers based on the new IBM Power10 processor, designed specifically for hybrid cloud environments.
The IBM Power E1080 server is built around its IBM Power10 processor. Designed by IBM and manufactured by Samsung using 7nm EUV process technology, Power10 is IBM’s first commercially available 7nm processor.
Power10 took more than five years to develop and resulted in hundreds of new and pending patents.
In August, IBM had fraud in its sights with the unveiling of its new Telum Processor, designed to bring deep learning inference to enterprise workloads.
The company announced the news at its annual Hot Chips conference. Three years in the making, Telum is IBM’s first processor that contains on-chip acceleration for artificial intelligence inferencing while a transaction is taking place. IBM is looking to offer customers business insights across banking, finance, trading, insurance applications and customer interactions. A Telum-based system is planned for the first half of 2022.
Image courtesy of Honda.
