Business Challenges

Our client faced several challenges that had an impact on gaining adequate visibility of their Trade Promotion Management. These include:

• The overall trade spend exceeded 35% of sales, making it the second-largest component in the client’s P&L.
• The processes were designed to circumvent the system performance issues, leading to poor performance of the planning tool with a large number of promotion types.
• The reporting and analysis planning solution was not being updated on-time, causing frequent SLA escalations.
• The planners did not have visibility to the promotional P&L on a real-time basis, and the reporting was slow.

The Solution

TekLink suggested a multi-wave approach to implement HANA and Accelerated Trade Promotions Management on HANA, considering factors like technical environment, hardware readiness, leadership mandates like “quick time to value” and many others.

• A separate BW on HANA environment was established, with the Development and QA environments on Amazon Cloud and production on-premise.
• A strong foundation was set aiming at addressing critical reporting and planning issues:
  • The data models and ABAP are optimized.
  • The HANA studio leveraged characteristics derivations and several innovative methods used to improve overall reporting and planning process performance.
  • Introduction of day-level planning, elimination of several promotional types, event-based updates redesigned, and display pallet functionality streamlined among many other process changes.
  • Built the promotion effectiveness dashboards using BusinessObjects dashboarding tools.

Key Benefits

• Achieved Near Real-Time visibility during the planning phase.
• A multi-fold improvement in the reporting and planning performance with the SLA issues eliminated.
• An improved planning accuracy.
• Provision for online processing, simplified layouts, and streamlined processes improved the usability of the tool.
• Enabling the visibility to ROI by promotion/event (to the level of material and customer).
• An improved trade promotion effectiveness helped in boosting the operating margin.