An electrifying new beginning – Establishing a daily, automated reporting system based on SAP data in a global energy technology company
Task
After being spun off from a globally active parent company, our client was confronted with an urgent problem: The extensive resources that had been available to the client in IT and BI for finance and sales were now no longer accessible. However, in order to be able to organize the company and product management effectively and efficiently in the future, a new, automated and, above all, globally linked and up-to-date reporting system based on SAP-data had to be established - a Herculean task in which other consulting companies had failed.
For our customer, comprehensive automation of the data query had not been feasible until now. To bridge the international data pools, static, complex and time-consuming manual raw data exports in the form of Excel spreadsheets were used for evaluation, but these were not sufficient to do justice to the agile nature of a modern company. The seven different SAP-systems - one per company location - were also to be combined and standardized in the evaluation of their data in order to be able to provide an up-to-date, company-wide overview for various stakeholders at all times. The goal was as clear as it was complex: a first-time consolidated presentation of the seven different SAP-systems with a high level of detail down to order level, which combined a harmonization of product diversity and demanded the lowest possible maintenance effort with a consistently highest data quality to promote the longevity of the tool throughout the company.
This is where we came into the picture in order to develop in agile, tailor-made connection with our client a product that would ensure the best possible longevity for simplified, data-driven decision making in terms of finance and production through dashboards.
Implementation
As we worked together, it quickly became clear that our client's needs would not just extend to linking the different data structures. Our solution would encompass two products to meet the needs and efficiency of the company: A Finance Dashboard on the one hand, and a Pricing Tool on the other.
But first things first. Our client had already made use of the globally established SAP tool. The advantage of SAP was that information could be made available more quickly and flexibly for an individual location specific reporting. However, in the backend, the functional part of the tool beyond the visually tangible user interface, it became apparent that standartization and harmonization of KPIs across the different SAP-systems, to provide a holistic company-wide finance statement, also brought about its own problems: the fact that the logic of the background processes was not always completely uniform made it difficult for us to adapt the standardized functionality to the specific needs of our customer.
This resulted in a broad-based yet pragmatic approach: the identification of SAP key figures across locations and systems to create global standard key figure views on the one hand, and the establishment of new product and customer naming standards using clustering algorithms for harmonization by recording and managing the customer's product diversity on the other. All of this was done with the overarching goal in mind of making the seemingly impossible possible for the first time: connecting the global SAP systems.
In our very first meeting with the customer, we set the course for the final product, whereby the establishment of this new approach to handling data was to serve the primary and forward-looking goal of making pricing analyzable - also on a global level. Revenue, production, product variety and backlog were just some of the relevant data sets that we wanted to access more effectively and efficiently. So, we set about visualizing this data in user-friendly and intuitive dashboards.
Result
The Finance Dashboard we designed enables the management level to always have the latest and most important data available immediately. Whether revenue, order intake, gross profit or backlog - the dashboard provides all this information in an intuitive and extremely user-friendly way that combines all the advantages of digital, agile working, from the best state-of-the-art functionalities of a BI tool to training options for users. It is as convenient to use as an app: functioning as a kind of management cockpit, the dashboard also makes it easier to access the necessary data for annual overviews or locations, thus facilitating forward-looking, future-oriented and data-based planning - maximum efficiency, everything at a glance.
“Our dashboard provides information in an intuitive and user-friendly way.”
A similarly pragmatic and effective approach applies to the Pricing Tool that was developed for the department of sales: Through visualized, detailed analyses down to order level global data sets have become easy to compare and evaluate. Every question regarding sales has become optimally adaptable to the user’s needs and can be answered with minimal effort through daily updated data sets, functioning as a slice- and dicable Data Cube that provides financial insights on product and offer level. The Pricing Tool not only enables an ideal level of application of filters with a high degree of comfort for its users through integrated feature updates, optimized retractable filter bars for screenshots and presentation mode, information buttons for outliers in data and an easy-to-use navigation bar.
Customized settings in accordance with the preferences of each user can also be set to default, thus minimizing daily effort per user, and enabling effective switching between analyses and dashboards - while at the same time enabling users to create their own data visualizations long-term. Thanks to the tool's automated daily updates, our customer can now not only access much more accurate data, but also save costs and effort - where previously larger teams of employees had to additionally take care of the elaborate and time-consuming task of obtaining the most up-to-date data possible for day-to-day business, the dashboard now takes care of these work steps daily, immediately and by itself. This means that all employees, regardless of location, can now benefit from this implementation and make their day-to-day work more effective and efficient.
Outlook
Not only did our client present us with an exciting challenge, which we were able to master together as an experienced and well-attuned team; our customer-oriented, efficient collaboration has allowed us to maintain an agile approach that has enabled us to react immediately to new needs or changing priorities. Though it wasn't just a completely new, intuitive and agile approach to data analysis and management for finance and sales that gave our client a major advantage: Through accompanying workshops that trained employees and introduced them to the new dashboards in an understandable way, a clear self-service aspect came to the fore here, which not only provides the company and the employees themselves with revealing insights into their high-quality data models, but above all also saves resources in the long term and sustainably promotes the longevity of the product through the low manual care and maintenance effort of the data records.
With the successful creation of a daily updated SAP-based reporting system for a global company, we not only succeeded in solving an outstanding, complex problem. A project like this makes it clear that data-driven decisions at every level, at every level of detail, for every purpose, locally and globally, continue to be the most effective and efficient approach to achieving a company’s long-term sovereignty and future-oriented action.
Piero Alessio
CEO
