BW Powered by HANA for SHS Group: the roadmap for optimised analytics

[Former Member]

The Business

The SHS Group Ltd is privately owned and operates in the fast moving consumer goods sector. From its Belfast headquarters, the Group provides a strong financial base and central resources for four divisions operating within brand ownership and sales & marketing. Established in 1975, the SHS Group has a turnover of over £400 million and employs around 700 people across the UK and Ireland.

The Challenges

For SHS Group, reporting and analytics is vital to the business for both strategic and operational decision making. Information exchange is an important part of SHS Group’s relationship with its customers as well as to the internal operations and the long term growth plans.

Their SAP Business Warehouse (BW) platform provides reporting and planning capability across all of the key business areas, but prior to HANA it provided some common challenges to both the business reporting and IT teams:

• Long running report times, sometimes leading to timeouts
• Report specifications kept simple against requirements, in order to ensure performance
• Growing data storage volumes, which would be further impacted by a continued acquisition program
• Lengthy data loading times with tight windows for corrections of any issues
• Long data loading times for reloads of data following modelling changes to meet evolving business requirements

The Business Case

Following a series of technology assessment days and evaluation of market options, SHS Group selected SAP HANA and SAP BusinessObjects BI to provide a strategic platform for information management across, supporting decision makings and providing a platform for business growth.  The anticipation benefits of the project focused around:

Sales

• Richer reporting / Increased adoption
• Lowered effort – report creation             

Finance

• Enhanced metric reporting / accelerated planning process / reduced auditor workload

Further processes

• Advanced insight per customer
• Accelerated update on stocks

Business Intelligence

• Increased loading efficiency & speed / boosted query performance

Infrastructure

• Simplified admin via one tool / increased compression rates / slashed DB maintenance costs

Innovation

• Ultimate platform for business innovation
• Innovation without disruption
• Long running report times, sometimes leading to timeouts
• Report specifications kept simple against requirements, in order to ensure performance
• Growing data storage volumes, which would be further impacted by a continued acquisition program
• Lengthy data loading times with tight windows for corrections of any issues
• Long data loading times for reloads of data following modelling changes to meet evolving business requirements

SHS Groups’ business case and investment paper was built around the following elements :

Benefits	Costs
Business productivity savings with improved query run times Improved reporting and planning capabilities System landscape saving Reduced system maintenance Reduced data loading windows Enhanced data availability	HANA Licensing HANA hardware Ongoing HANA hardware support SAP App Server hardware Implementation and consultancy costs Ongoing support and maintenance

BW Powered by HANA

The BW on HANA migration involved moving four 600GB systems from existing Oracle databases onto the SAP HANA platform. The migration phase was successfully completed in a 12 week period and was delivered both on time and under budget. AgilityWorks provided a complete delivery model which included full project management, project governance and the relevant skills to deliver the full end to end migration which included certified database migration, Basis, BW and HANA resources.

The Benefits

The benefits of BW powered by HANA were instantly realised by SHS Group with report times being improved by 98% on average. Report times taking around 3 minutes prior to BW on HANA now run in less than 2 seconds. This represents a significant productivity gain for reporting users now that their multitude of daily reports can be run in seconds rather than minutes, also combined by the ability to run more complex and detailed reports still within these expedited response times. The feedback from the 250+ user community was extremely positive.

“Given the huge success and immediate benefits realised by our BW on HANA migration, I look forward to the next phase of our Data Analytics vision and strategy”

John McLarnon, Head of Information Systems & Information Technology at SHS Group

“It is most encouraging when user feedback switches from one of disgruntlement to words like; fluid and responsive, ground breaking, instantaneous, tremendous improvement, excited to self-serve more often…”

SHS Group

Data loads times have been reduced by more than 60%, meaning a reduced batch window and the ability to guarantee data availability by 08:00 each day.

The summary of the high level benefits include:

• Queries 100x quicker
• 6x data storage compression
• Data load times 70% improved

The Roadmap

SHS Group are now embarking on implementing a number of visual analytic initiatives, including dashboards and data exploration, all underpinned by the BW on HANA Platform.