Upgrading SAP BW system to harness HANA for enhanced BO reporting

A leading Middle Eastern conglomerate upgrades its SAP BW system with Maventic to harness HANA for enhanced BO reporting
                                       

The client is a diversified wholesale and retail business conglomerate across apparel, consumer electronics, FMCG, and other industries with a presence in 12 countries.

Business Scenario

Before partnering with Maventic, the client had integrated its business processes with SAP ECC 6.0 IS-Retail system. It simultaneously relied on SAP Business Warehouse 7.3 to manage its analytical needs. However, despite migrating to BW on HANA, the client needed help to realize its BW system’s potential efficiently. 

Challenges
The existing analytical system posed several challenges, including:

• Inability to analyze businesses across different sectors due to varying business processes, which resulted in a lack of a single version of the truth.
• Limited insights on combo products, retail sales, distribution, and vendor performance.
• Manual reporting of financial ratios, P&L statements, fund flow across the organization, and balance sheets.
• Absence of analytical reports based on loyalty for retail customers.
• Lack of data integration from multiple systems such as EWM, POS, and ECC.
• Unreliable sales forecast data for the wholesale business sector.
• Lack of clarity on import procurement and vendor performance.
• Lack of progressive rebate analysis.
• Challenges in combining data from the client's real estate business, managed by a third-party system, with SAP data for certain reports.
• Lack of an organization-wide reporting solution to establish standard reporting practices across different sections, such as wholesale, retail, and real estate.
• Limited interactive reports or dashboards for top management.
• Limited alert-based reporting and reduced report performance due to large volume of data in inventory and sales.

Solution
To address the above challenges, the client decided to embark on a re-development project to harness HANA’s full capabilities and generate business-centric reports across various modules from retail and wholesale divisions. 

Upon evaluating multiple SAP business analytics partners, Maventic's proposal was selected to develop a solution utilizing SAP BW 7.4 on HANA and BusinessObjects 4.1. This solution would enable consistent interpretation of data through both Excel and graphical-based information presentation.

The solution developed by Maventic had two components:

Analytical Reports: Excel-based SAP BEx reports were developed to allow business users to analyze, slice, and dice data according to their specific requirements. These reports provided in-depth information, including alert-based distribution of important KPIs. They were developed on data models created on BW on HANA using LSA++ architecture, ensuring better data quality and consistency, making it easier to generate accurate business intelligence reports and insights.

Dashboards: Concise and graphical representation of information, including cross-sector analysis, enabled higher management to construct future strategies. These dashboards assisted in monitoring key performance indicators, identifying trends, and visualizing data in a format that was easy to interpret.
 

Benefits

Utilizing SAP BW 7.4 on HANA and BusinessObjects 4.1, the client can now:

• Improve the quality and relevance of their decision-making processes.
• Create a unified view of enterprise information across all business areas and sectors.
• Effectively manage large amounts of data by distributing providers based on sector.
• Leverage LSA++ architecture to optimize BW objects for use with HANA.
• Respond to user needs by ensuring the timely availability of data.
• Analyze wholesale sales data, including combo and individual articles, purchase reports with rebate analysis, sales and inventory reports, and vendor performance reports.