Few months back, I got the opportunity to work in and acquire a new skill called DSiM. The journey was as enriching as it was challenging and I really saw the light at the end of the tunnel after days of arduous adventures into the ebb and flow of this new world.
Bolstering a decade of BW and 3 years of HANA experience, I was naively overconfident that this new skill would be a walk in the park...only to be taken aback by the staggering amount of new concepts this formidable system threw on my face !
I started to acknowledge the utility of this system and was delightfully overwhelmed by the fact that this system is a remarkable synergy of BW, BODS, HANA UI5 and Functional knowhow. At the outset, I lacked the wherewithal needed to cruise this sea swiftly but along the way I garnered some vital points, courtesy DSiM luminaries with whom I worked, which helped me fathom the very purpose of this system and also aided me to acclimatize with the intricacies of the workings of this system.
Well, without further ado, let me get straight to the point - This series of blogs is intended to precipitate the understanding of the system and also share the experience I had during my stint into this esoteric (so far) world called - DSiM (Demand Signal Management, powered by SAP HANA)
This series will be divided into following chapters to render a structure to our content:
"Hello World...DSiM" - Purpose
Let's get technical - Architecture
What do we analyze….mention the 3 dimension - Sales, Stock, Time.
Introducing the 3 musketeers: Origin, Providers & Deliveries
Conquer the Maze - Get to know each phase - Upload
Conquer the Maze - Get to know each phase - Quality
Conquer the Maze - Get to know each phase - Harmonize
Conquer the Maze - Get to know each phase - Enrich
End of the Maze - Get to know each phase - Report
Know the CEO: Commonly Encountered Obstacles
Enough of the crude...let's Conclude.
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Understanding the Purpose
Let me take a small example - As a BW consultant, we spend hours of meticulous effort to prepare a custom report and deploy it in production.
With a bright smile and high hopes (for RC = 4 or 0), we promote the work and send an email to stakeholders that the report is promoted to Production and Data is loaded...a victorious moment indeed ! which sometimes culminate in team dinners or off-the-record parties !.
When the excitement fizzles out, the realization surfaces that no response was received regarding the report and neither did anyone lodge any complaints (defects, in our technical verbiage). Time for a reality check; the slew of doubts spiraling the mind: Are users really using the report? If yes, how many users are using it?
Is it giving them any business value? What can I do to make it more visible? How can I enhance it to make it more meaningful and of a greater utility?
But HOW to get answers to these questions?
The answer morphs into the following factors:
Hard Factors:
1. Enhancements asked by users to the report.
2. Defects logged in the defect Mgmt tool.
Soft Factors:
1. The Existence of any similar report offering them greater value. (Competition)
2. Daily use or seasonal use (Fiscal year-end, month-end etc). (Weather)
3. Word of Mouth from other people regarding your report. (Social Media)
Directly proportional to the above factors is the value and usage of your report.
An enterprise such as Colgate, Nestle, Coke, is no different. They too have those daunting slew of doubts: Are consumers really using their new toothpaste? How many users are using it? How well it fares with other similar brands? How can they make it better so that it becomes the de-facto?
So you see, the situation is not that different where a single BW consultant faces the same situation as an enterprise.
And the answers to these, for an enterprise, lies in the following factors:
Hard Factor:
1. Number of POs (purchase orders) from their retailers and wholesalers for replenishment.
Soft Factor:
1. Existence of similar products (Competition)
2. How are people talking about it (Social Media)
3. How's the seasons affecting my sales (Weather)
So far so good...the good ol' ways of getting the answer. But is it efficient? Can the answers be retrieved faster?
Indeed YES!
For a BW consultant, the SAP-send is 'SAP BW Admin Cockpit' which instantly gives you the statistics about the usage of the report. The facebook-like hits on the report and many more features of utility. So a BW consultant doesn't have to wait for defects or enhancements to guage the popularity of the report anymore.
But what for an Enterprise?...Although it took some time but the savior is ...DSiM (Demand Signal Management, powered by SAP HANA). And it does the deed by directly embracing the POS (Billing Till/point of sales) data, the data which directly gets fed to computers with barcode scans before it drops in your shopping trolley and eventually in your car trunk.
This way an enterprise doesn't have to wait for PO from their business partners which can take several days and several weeks (if data from across the globe needs to be consolidated and harmonized). Instead the POS data, which is usually available the next day, is immediately fed to DSiM and then analyzed to answer those barrage of doubts and questions.
Moreover, not only POS data but it also accepts data about its competition (a.k.a Retail Panel), People's opinion (Social media) and the affects of seasons (a.k.a Weather Data).
So in essence, DSiM is a harmonization system which helps an enterprise answer the same set of questions which a BW consultant or for that matter any consultant faces!
Hope that gave some primer to build our next content on. Stay tuned for more...
