Hitachi consolidates disparate data Into one operating experience

Hitachi isn’t a company as much as an industrial constellation. With more than 607 group companies operating across 190 markets, the Japanese conglomerate touches everything from energy infrastructure and bullet trains to healthcare and life sciences. Decades of acquisitions and organic growth had left the organization with a stubborn problem: its data lived in hundreds of independent silos. Different CRMs — Salesforce, SAP, Dynamics, and other data sources. There were different formats, different teams, different rules everywhere. No one had a complete picture of anything.

The result wasn’t just inefficiency, it created a strategic blind spot.

A conventional fix — consolidating everything into a single, centralized CRM — had already been tried. It stalled after the complexity of standardizing data across hundreds of companies proved nearly impossible.

McKinsey research has consistently found that 70% of transformation efforts fail to meet their objectives. The recurring culprit is always the same: organizations try to overhaul everything at once rather than build on what already exists.

Hitachi needed a new approach and a leader to guide it. It found one.

Bala Krishnapillai, SVP and CIO, joined Hitachi America in 2019, and stepped into a data landscape shaped by decades of decentralized decision-making. Regional headquarters had long provided business support to their group companies, but IT couldn’t keep pace with the demand.

“Every division ended up buying a lot of point solutions, because IT was not fast enough for the business,” says Krishnapillai. “And some solutions were legacy products because we acquired companies as well.”

Krishnapillai had seen this kind of complexity before. His approach was counterintuitive: leave every source system exactly where it was. He didn’t ask any business unit to change how it operated.

“We should not touch the source,” Krishnapillai says. “Rather, we decided to create a layer that is more transient in nature. It can provide value instantly.”

That data fabric would connect to each system, harmonize the data into a common model, and deliver a unified view across the company without disrupting anything already running. The vision was clear. The execution needed the right partner.

Hitachi partnered with Appian to bring the architecture to life. Using Appian’s data fabric technology, the team is on a mission to create a unified platform that connects disparate systems from their group companies without requiring data migrations. Twenty systems were connected in the first year. The value of Appian’s data fabric is its ability to treat remote data like local data, eliminating the complex data engineering and coding required by traditional data approaches.

This seamless data connection was central to the speed of execution. What could have taken years through traditional development was in production within 90 days. The platform began processing more than one million daily transactions and supporting more than 6,500 users across the global organization.

The architecture didn’t replace what Hitachi had built over decades. It unlocked it.

Before One Hitachi went live, gathering data for customer proposals was a multi-week ordeal. Information requests flowed through a central team. Every stage required manual research. The underlying data only refreshed monthly; by the time a sales team assembled what it needed, the opportunity had often already moved on.

With the data fabric in place, the same intelligence was available almost instantly.

The competitive impact was immediate. Hitachi’s head of Global Accounts told Krishnapillai that the company had previously lost projects because regional teams lacked visibility into what other divisions could offer. Different regions couldn’t bundle resources or capabilities they didn’t know existed.

Appian delivers a real-time view of customer activity across all regions: which accounts were active, which proposals were in flight, and where cross-selling opportunities existed, all within a single platform. Sales leaders now have real-time analytics and dashboards to make faster, better-informed decisions.

The platform also transformed data quality at the point of ingestion. Rather than relying on manual data scrubbing — a process that had previously consumed significant staff time — Appian’s data fabric automates the harmonization. “When a field comes in, the system automatically recognizes it and creates a master record with high data fidelity,” says Krishnapillai.

The numbers tell the story: a 40% efficiency gain for sales and marketing operations. A 20% reduction in operating costs. A 60% savings on development cycle time. Hitachi also reduced its number of Salesforce instances by consolidating data mining and back-office research into Appian while field teams retained Salesforce for direct customer engagement.

Krishnapillai sees the CRM deployment as a proof of concept, not the final project. The architecture that unified Hitachi’s sales data is now the template for other domains across the company — including cybersecurity and compliance.

With the Appian data fabric in place, Hitachi has embedded AI readiness into its workflows. This gives sales teams the ability to query structured and unstructured data using natural language rather than writing SQL.

Krishnapillai’s longer-term vision is an “autonomous digital enterprise,” where AI agents move from human-managed workflows to autonomous digital enterprises that are faster, smarter, and at scale.

What started as a fragmented sales data problem has become an operating philosophy: connect the data, don’t centralize it. Perfect the architecture in one domain, then apply it to the next.

Krishnapillai has spent 27 years learning what doesn’t work in enterprise transformation. At Hitachi, working with Appian, he built what does.

“Data, automation, AI — all three combined together,” he says, “will allow me to achieve autonomous operations.”