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Wanting full visibility across its supply chain, Usha International decided to migrate to SAP HANA. It’s among the first Indian organizations to move its entire database onto HANA. By Jasmine Desai
While most organizations are still contemplating going in for in-memory analytics, Usha International has plunged right ahead and deployed SAP HANA. Since 2000, the company has used SAP software to gain a competitive advantage by improving process efficiency. Just as India’s demand for consumer products has grown, so has the complexity of running a business that spans a nation of over 1.2 billion people. Presently, the organization has over 33 warehouses, 70 company-owned retail stores and a distribution network of 14,000 plus dealers.
Usha needed full visibility across its widespread supply chain and the ability to respond rapidly to changing market demands. “We have a lot of business data,” said Subodh Dubey, group CIO at Usha International Limited. “To take full advantage of this resource, we need high-performance business analytics as well. That means faster data loads and faster query response times.”
The data growth presently, is at 20% annually.
The deployment
With these goals in mind, the organization decided to ramp up its BI capabilities. It chose to go with the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse component that would run on a HANA database. Essentially being a SAP shop, it felt that running any kind of report or project on an integrated system would prove to be more effective.
Having faced performance bottlenecks and trouble in sourcing information in real time, regional reports used to take ten minutes to generate; that time has reduced to less than a minute post-HANA; it was an easy choice to make.
Earlier, users used Excel to generate reports for review with IBM DB2 as the database. It has been replaced by HANA. Dubey said, “We were able to migrate because hardly 15% of the users were on DB2. When BI is used in a transactional system or as an add-on, then change management becomes an issue. For a standalone BI system, it is not such a big issue.”
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During the migration, both the systems were run in parallel, keeping in mind the fact that the implementation might fail. In that case, the company had the option of reverting to the old system.
Usha worked with a dedicated SAP Ramp-Up coach and utilized the vendor’s Enterprise Support services throughout the implementation process. It held regular review meetings and ensured that the project was staffed with the right analytics skill sets. This approach helped Usha complete the entire project in just four weeks rolling out, as it did, the solution to 16 branch offices, 30 depots, and four manufacturing plants. The implementation has been done at its data center in Gurgaon.
Post deployment
“Implementing SAP HANA has improved performance tremendously with faster data loads and better storage compression. We have given a new lease of life to our business intelligence solution,” said Dubey.
Consolidating information wasn’t possible before the HANA rollout. Inventory reports took ages to run. Post-deployment, Usha International was able to reduce its inventory by 50%.
It has also been able to save a hundred minutes per report created per person. Within three months, the organization has been able to map these tangible and intangible results. Earlier, the transactional load from SAP ERP to BI used to take ten hours. This time has been reduced to two hours and the company hopes to reduce it further to an hour.
The data warehouse, which was 490 GB, has been reduced to 47 GB thanks to HANA. The ability to quickly analyze secondary sales data and check progress against monthly sales has also helped the sales force achieve its targets.
“Reports on cash flow and daily sales are now available at the click of a button,” said Dubey. “For the first time, we have sales visibility down to the individual SKU and territory.”
In the coming months, Usha expects to more than double the number of employees using HANA. The company intends to roll out the functionality to other areas of the business such as manufacturing and human resources as well.
Usha also wants to integrate its BusinessObjects solutions and, ultimately, the SAP Planning and Consolidation application with NetWeaver BW. The goal is to more fully utilize data from a wide variety of information sources. These include retail point-of-sale reports, the customer service portal, e-mail and even social media.
A deeper understanding of consumers will improve the company’s ability to respond effectively to changing market dynamics. The current issue it faces with BPC is that it takes 24 hours time to give any planning results. Its objective is to provide product heads with the functionality to conduct planning for their business on a monthly basis from the system. They will be in a position to simulate various scenarios through the system, something that’s not possible currently. Dubey concluded, “It is time that analytics started taking a leap forward towards becoming part of the core IT infrastructure in an organization.”
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