Business Challenges

The client experienced challenges with their Trade Promotion Management, which impacted their visibility. Some of which are:

• Their trade spend was over 35% of sales which became the 2nd largest factor in their P&L.
• In addition, the client’s processes were designed to bypass system performance issues, leading to poor performance of the planning tool when dealing with a large number of promotion types.
• Reporting and analysis planning solution lacked timely updates, leading to frequent SLA escalations.
• Furthermore, the planners lacked real-time visibility into the promotional P&L, and the reporting was slow.

The Solution

• To implement HANA and Accelerated Trade Promotions Management on HANA, TekLink recommended a multi-wave approach, taking into account factors such as technical environment, hardware readiness, and the need for quick time-to-value.
• The team established a separate BW on HANA environment, with Development and QA environments hosted on Amazon Cloud and production hosted on-premise.
• To improve critical planning and reporting issues, a solid foundation was established, including optimization of data models and ABAP.
• The HANA studio utilized characteristic derivations and innovative methods to improve overall reporting and planning process performance.
• The team also streamlined processes by introducing day-level planning, eliminating certain promotional types, and redesigning event-based updates and display pallet functionality.
• Promotion effectiveness dashboards were built using BusinessObjects dashboarding tools.

Business Outcomes and Benefits

• Achieved near-real-time visibility during the planning phase.
• Realized a significant improvement in reporting and planning performance, resulting in the elimination of SLA issues.
• Enhanced planning accuracy and improved usability of the tool through online processing, simplified layouts, and streamlined processes.
• Enabled visibility to ROI by promotion/event at the material and customer level.
• The effective use of trade promotions led to an increase in operating margin.