The project I am going to present has been delivered for a large customer who is the world’s leading concessions and construction group!
The three companies at the heart of the group’s integrated model form an unrivalled network of expertise. In 2012, their 176,500 employees worked on 265,000 projects in some 100 countries.Victim of their own success, this customer’s growth was impressive, fueled by an aggressive acquisition strategy which led to a very heterogeneous application landscape.
The challenge was to deliver a transversal and dedicated platform for the group to reconciliate the Information System Landscape heterogeneity into one world.
Based on this requirement, SAP proposed to implement SAP HANA as a datamart. On this dedicated platform, all the group companies’ information needed to be centralized in a unique single point of information. BI 4.0 was the central Business Intelligence (BI) application for reporting and dashboarding.
SAP helped the customer identify the main pain points and priorities to reach the requirements.
The customer has a very large and heterogeneous landscape. The challenge was to help the customer meet the following requirements:
- Converge in a unique and standardized platform
- Align the BI Strategy with the operational strategy
- Define a solution that will be able to grow with the future business requirements
The landscape required a long and painful data reconciliation process. Loads of manual process was needed to fill the gaps which lead to potential errors, rework and so on…
At the very beginning, three areas have been identified by the customer as critical to improve:
- Financial: How to optimize the controlling process?
- Purchasing: How to automate the purchasing consolidation process?
- HR: How to control and check the evolution of the payroll trends and how to follow the professional career of the employees?
The first priority was to optimize the controlling process. Initially, the reconciliation on controlling data was taking over three weeks for the quarter closing. As the controlling process was too long, the customer couldn’t reconciliate its data properly every month.
SAP Consulting proposed to start from the beginning: Business processes’ understanding!
We worked together in order to simplify and automate the business processes so they could save time and take advantage of the real time replication.
After the validation of the new architecture by the customer, we started two different streams: a functional and a technical one.
The functional stream’s goal was to redesign and standard the process from the source system to the BI report for the consolidation.
The technical stream’s objective was to install and configure the environment (SLT, DataServices, SAP HANA, BI4.0)
The value for SAP consulting was to help the customer translate the business requirements into an SAP Architecture and Tools. The approach was to let the business requirement drive the IT and, based on their needs, see how IT can help / support the business!
Operationally speaking, from a three weeks of process, the customer went down to one day of closing process. In this new landscape, the business can perform monthly closing which was not possible in the past. Moreover, SAP HANA provides new opportunities with real time reports and dashboards but also allows the customer explore KPIs with the Explorer application:
By converging into a unique and standardized platform, and aligning its BI strategy to its operational strategy, the customer managed to simplify its processes but also its IT infrastructure.
The solution proposed to the customer led to the following key benefits:
- Real time Interaction for Analysts
- Information System Agility
- Better Governance
From my point of view, my best rewards in this project was to help the customer structure its dreams (because it was a nightmare before), to build this dream together and finally make its dream come true with SAP HANA!
To learn more about how SAP HANA Services can help you can eliminate barriers to fast, informed decisions, please visit us online: http://www.sap.com/services-support/svc/in-memory-computing.html.
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