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Former Member

On a hot, noisy racetrack, Formula 1 race cars roar through tight curves at blistering speeds. Aerodynamic design and powerful engines make the cars go faster. But Pirelli tires – the only point of contact between the car and the road – help the vehicles run safely. Pirelli designs and manufactures the premium tires for cars, trucks, and motorcycles that boost driver performance and comfort, regardless of road surface or weather conditions.

Sophisticated sensors within the tires make this possible. The sensors collect data every single second and communicate with the vehicle and driver to determine proper inflation levels and road conditions that are localized with GPS locations. Hundreds of thousands of these tires are turning globally; imagine the amount of Big Data this creates.

Not surprisingly, these tires zip off the shelves just as fast as they roar on the road, and timely distribution was a challenge. As Pirelli’s customers are tire retailers and auto dealers, often times they wait until the end of the month to order in bulk and consequently, receive a discount that often bottleneck their custom-coded SAP ERP legacy system. So for Pirelli, number-crunching against big data was just too slow when trying to support quick order management decisions all at once, they needed near real-time insight to reduce the number of backorders by:

  • Analyzing sales data
  • Reviewing order shipments
  • Defining product pricing and calculate discounts
  • Determining inventory availability and location

                                    

Pirelli Tires is all about handling speed with excellence and maneuverability, so it’s only fitting for their back office to do the same. And by turning to SAP HANA, that’s exactly what Pirelli accomplished. Because of the company’s customized batch process, there was a unique opportunity to test the processing speed. With SAP Rapid Prototyping, delivered through SAP ActiveEmbedded support, Pirelli was able to set up and test-drive SAP HANA processing speeds on nonstandard applications. Daniele Benedetti, IT Specialist at Pirelli stated, “We considered it a proof of concept that could help us evaluate the performance of in-memory computing with our custom-developed applications. SAP HANA seemed like our best choice for moving the calculation processing off the SAP ERP server as well.”

As a result, the sales and distribution report runs 8.4 times faster and the database runtime also improved by 68%. Additionally, the data compression offered by SAP HANA reduced the storage space needed by 48%. With reports now refreshed every 10 minutes, Pirelli achieves the insight required to make better decisions and reduce the number of backorders, allowing Pirelli to win the race for customer satisfaction.

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