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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
A Fortune 500 company engaged in the development, manufacture and sale of a wide range of grooming products.
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.
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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Considerable improvement in data quality leading to better
decision making ability |
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Reduction in forecasting errors |
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Reduction in licensing and maintenance costs |
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Uptime of more than 99.85% due to automation of all data loading
and monitoring processes. |
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