Business Challenge:

In a razor-thin margin distribution business this client’s CFO faced significant cash-flow challenges due to poor visibility to profitability, charge-backs and business health in general. The high transaction volumes prevented executives from access time-sensitive financial data on a regular basis. As a result, making strategic financial decisions let alone tactical ones were greatly hampered. The cascading effects of slow performance prevented even the most basic of reporting let alone advanced analytics capabilities from even being considered part of their daily business routine. From a systems’ point of view, the queries were impacting SAP ERP, when trying to pull extremely large volumes of data for reporting. Overall, there was a lack of a comprehensive Data warehouse and analytics strategy.

TekLink’s Solution:

TekLink analyzed the desired business growth plans, current impediments, pain-points, and current architectural and organizational limitations and proposed a comprehensive business intelligence tools & analytics solutions roadmap to help the client reach the desired end-state. A Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly approach was recommended to enable the organization to overcome technical, organizational, cultural and knowledge management challenges as they embarked on this roadmap to build a scalable and robust BI platform using BW, HANA and BusinessObjects tools to deliver value to the business.

Details:

TekLink worked with the client to implement TekLink’s Analytics Roadmap Approach. This consisted of the following steps of our proprietary ‘Value Wheel’© Methodology :

• Interviews with Executives, Business & IT leaders
• Review of Existing Reporting Systems and overall landscape
• Deep dive for specific high value pain-points
• Analysis and synthesis of data
• Recommendations for BI solutions portfolio and Robust BI reference architecture
• Resulting Analytics Roadmap prioritization and recommendations

The Result:

The client executed the analytics roadmap and built a BW on HANA based Datawarehouse solution. One of the first initiatives was to implement BW HANA for COPA to successfully address the cash-flow problem. Automated financial reporting and improved visibility to details enabled improved organizational efficiencies and system performance. The comprehensive analytics roadmap enabled the client to build a robust platform to help take analytics to the next level.

Benefits:

The benefits to our client have been numerous:

• Robust and Scalable Data warehouse
• The client can now run the business
• The client positioned to extrapolate and go beyond just reporting and enter into more advanced topics such as predictive analytics. The results were spectacular with BW on HANA retrieving 209 million rows of data in 17 seconds alone.