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| Case Study |
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SAP BW helps leading electronics goods manufacturer improve decision making ability |
Leveraging Patni's SAP expertise, a leader in sound systems succeeded in significantly reducing its licensing and maintenance costs by migrating from an sub-optimal datawarehouse system to SAP BW
The Client
The client is a leading electronics goods company that manufactures world class sound systems.
The Challenge
A global organization, the client had operations in multiple regions including the United States of America, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. To efficiently monitor its operations, there was a compelling need for the client to have global visibility of its operations. This required consolidation of information from all sources for enabling better decision making. To meet its reporting and information requirements, the client used a Sybase based datawarehouse with Business Objects as the tool for reports. Data from this datawarehouse was derived from diverse applications such as SAP R/3, Manugistics, MANMAN, Hyperion, and from a homegrown system.
However, the client was unable to take strategic decisions based on global sales data as the existing reporting functionality was more transactional than strategic. Other significant challenges included:
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On SAP R/3, multiple jobs were running continuously to extract the data to be pushed upwards to the datawarehouse. This resulted in a tremendous load on SAP R/3 |
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With the increase in the user base, the client's requirements had increased and the existing datawarehouse was unable to scale due to design and maintenance issues |
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Supporting the datawarehouse was turning out to be expensive due to hardware, system support and licensing costs apart for the inherent data modeling issues associated with it. |
Hence, the client wanted a datawarehouse which would give it the ability to take strategic decisions based on the global sales data coming in from all countries while reducing maintenance and license costs.
The Solution
After evaluating different options, SAP BW was chosen as the new datawarehouse and SAP Enterprise Portal as the presentation layer for all new developments. The decision was based on the following factors:
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Product maintenance and licensing cost was much lower than the existing datawarehouse as SAP R/3 was already implemented as the ERP |
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The customer already had a long-term strategy of moving all its transaction based activities globally to SAP R/3. Hence, leveraging reporting requirements through SAP BW would be more effective. |
As Patni had worked with this client on multiple engagements, the client was confident that Patni could provide strategic inputs while implementing the BW system. Based on a detailed study of the requirements, Patni helped the client identify the BW reporting tool, decide the master data and the number of data targets that would be required to meet current and future business requirements.
Patni partnered with the client and adopted a methodical transition process. The transition started off initially by identifying high priority applications. The plan for migration to SAP BW was carried out in two phases, namely the Design Phase and Implementation phase. Keeping in mind the inherent multi-dimensional modeling capabilities of SAP BW, Patni took extra efforts to ensure that a more robust and cost effective design was developed. To address the issue of poor data quality, efforts were made to ensure that the owners of the non-SAP source systems cleaned and rectified their data before submitting the same to the datawarehouse. Patni's BW experts also customized the SAP BW in a way that enabled the SAP business content to meet the business requirements.
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The Technology
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SAP BW |
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SAP Enterprise Portal |
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The Benefits
By partnering with Patni, the client has succeeded in totally retiring the old datawarehouse with complete reporting done through SAP BW. Some significant benefits include:
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