Real time analysis of gross-to-net profitability can offer huge value to business executives.
For example, when you roll out a sales incentive program to boost sales, you want to know how much more revenue the incentives actually generated for you, and how it eventually impacts your profitability, especially when all the fees and costs are taken into consideration. Many SAP customers have already been using a solution called "SAP Incentive Administration and SAP Paybacks and Chargebacks by Vistex", which augments the ERP product to provide great insights for gross to net profitability analysis.
In today's competitive market, the challenge is not only that you want to have accurate profitability data but also that you want it right away. Given the constraints with traditional business analytics, it may take days or even months to get the insights you need. Getting real-time analysis was impossible until recently.
Remember the lady HANA that everybody wants to date nowadays as Lars Dalgaard put it in his recent Sapphire keynote? Well, We at COIL made the introduction to HANA for Vistex, and the relation worked out great. With the hardware provided by IBM, we set up a PoC environment at COIL as described in the diagram below. While ERP data is constantly replicated to HANA, all the magic things Vistex does can now be done almost real time. Ad hoc reports and drill-downs can be performed while millions of sales orders, sales incentives, sales rebates, and chargebacks are being processed.
To give you a sense, here is an example showing that increased sales incentive indeed significantly boosted sales for the target products
but actually brought down the net profitability of these products and negatively impacted the company's bottomlines.
What's really beautiful? With HANA, you get these insights real time.
For those who are interested in more details of the PoC, the project team has published a recorded demo and
a whitepaper which is featured at COIL homepage this month.
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