Global Reporting with BW/4HANA in an international Group

Challenge

The growing importance of planning and control tools to support decision-making, monitoring and organizational processes motivates and pushes companies to continuously invest in technological improvement, in order to optimize the quality, reliability and timing of the information produced.

In this context, the corporate data warehouse system assumes more and more value by becoming the “single source of truth” of corporate Global Reporting solutions.

The Client, an important Italian Group in the Chemical & Pharma sector, operating in about twenty countries located all over the world, has decided to start with Qintesi the executive project for the migration to the BW/4HANA suite. The challenge was to implement and improve the operation of 15 reporting solutions over a year and a half period.

Solution

The Customer’s goal was to prepare for the “end of maintenance” of the SAP BW application component, previously used in version 740, thus acquiring the information necessary for proper planning of the project interventions necessary for the evolution of SAP reporting solutions. Following the analysis of the assessment results, the Client decided to start with Qintesi the executive project for the transition to BW/4HANA / BPC 11 / SAC with the aim of obtaining the following benefits:

• technological innovation through the use of a modern EDW system;
• improvement and greater reliability of corporate core business information;
• greater scalability and flexibility of reporting solutions with respect to the change needs required by the business and the market;
• real time technology and simplification of the acquisition of information sources;
• better performance in line with modern company “fast closing” processes;
• standardization of corporate reporting tools and uniformity in process control.

The application areas involved were reproduced in the new system using a “Bluefield” approach, i.e. through a mix of reverse engineering, manual remodeling and technological migration. The transition activities were further enriched by interventions aimed at improvement, simplification and optimization, in compliance with the set objectives and in compliance with the continuity of reporting solutions within the project perimeter.

Below are the macro areas of reporting to support the corporate functions in the context of the project:

• Operational Control: reporting area and operational monitoring of analytics relating to the functional areas sales, CRM, finance, apo, purchasing, product cost controlling, production planning and treasury.
• Management Planning and Control: corporate planning and control area relating to the monitoring, planning and analysis of the differences between the final balance scenarios and the budgeting / forecasting scenarios.
• Group Consolidation: reporting area of ​​statutory and managerial consolidated data of the entire Company Group.