Bridgestone Motorsport UK

Bridgestone Motorsport (UK) is a branch office of Bridgestone Corporation, a multi-national company with its head office in Japan. Founded in 1931 the company has become one of the world's largest tyre manufacturers, and has significant operations in automotive parts, industrial goods, chemical products and sporting goods. The branch office was established in 1997 when Bridgestone entered Formula One (F1) and was established solely to administer and support F1 operations throughout the world.

The branch office is very efficient, employing just 30 staff, all based at High Wycombe. Its warehouse stores over 10,000 tyres of which approximately 2,000 are transported to each F1 event. The tyres are leased to the teams for testing and racing and must therefore be returned after each event - a phenomenal logistics exercise. The cost per season runs into millions of pounds and consequently the company looked for the most efficient way of running its accounts. All this information is now controlled by Access Accounts software.

The initial requirements for the accounting system included the ability to closely monitor expenses, report to head office in Japan and have scalability to handle multi-company accounts and growth. The company selected Access Accounts and has been delighted that it can move on from Macintosh to a PC based Windows '95 version of Access Accounts to run on an NT Network without having to re-learn the software, re-train staff or lose any data. Mr Keith F Bunce, Financial Controller stated: “This fully integrated accounting system has enabled Bridgestone to run F1 events in a more cost effective way and to save money with planning of future race meetings.”