Overview of the Client
Our client is a large Fortune 200 CPG Company

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.