The ability of in-memory computing to manage very large amounts of data in real time has revolutionized the way businesses analyze and report on business metrics, trends, and performance. Companies can now consider more granular data, execute more complex analyses, and run reports faster and more frequently. But it turns out that faster, more detailed, and more powerful is just the beginning. In fact, you can use the SAP HANA platform’s in-memory database technology to solve an entire new category of complex business problems. Even when working with large volumes of data, a multitude of independent and dependent variables, time-sensitive material, or other complexities, SAP HANA can handle it, in record time.
Taking Flight After Systemwide Disruptions
If you’ve ever been stuck in an airport during a bad snowstorm, you’re intimately familiar with this particular flavor of uncertainty and stress. When will the weather clear? Should I find a hotel? How can I make other travel arrangements? What is the airline planning to do? When does my flight crew time out? At this point, you’d do anything for timely, accurate information you can act on.
Though it may not seem like it when you’re the one stuck at gate 17A, major airlines have elaborate procedures to help them recover from disruptions. Say a storm shuts down five major East Coast airports. Each airline immediately uses sophisticated models designed to reroute hundreds of airplanes, flight crews, and on-ground support and supplies in the way that most efficiently gets thousands of passengers to their destinations.
It’s an enormous task. That’s why, until recently, a typical recovery plan took way too long to create and run. An airline would run its analysis only once the extent of the disruption was known. There was little possibility of recalculation or re-optimization based on changes in weather or travel plans. And only after the plan was created could the airline communicate specifics to passengers.
Today, however, airlines can use custom solutions from SAP HANA to model a plan in a matter of seconds – then update it just as quickly. And if you can create near real-time plans and recalculate as conditions change, you give passengers useful information just as quickly. The result? For the passengers, more information, more options, and less stress, and for the airline, huge savings.
Optimal Buying Decisions Fuel Maximum Profitability
Process manufacturers – food, beverage, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies – use precise formulas to determine ingredients and manufacturing processes. For chemical companies, these formulations can be very complex; routing, quality of ingredients, measurements, and pricing must be repeatedly evaluated to ensure maximum profitability and compliance with regulations that can vary significantly depending on the destination market. Large multinationals must also optimize sourcing and production of thousands of formulations and recipes across manufacturing plants, raw material sources, and currencies. Tracking in a timely manner the exact cost for each ingredient, let alone the final product, is challenging when you’re sourcing from multiple countries with fluctuating pricing for raw materials and exchange rates.
SAP HANA tames the complexity, making it possible for chemical manufacturers to consider all possible combinations of raw material sourcing options – taking into account pricing and exchange rate fluidity – in near real time. This gives sourcing experts a real on-the-ground understanding of how each decision affects overall product cost. Apply this technology to optimize buying and selling decisions across multiple product lines, sourcing countries, and exchange rates, and you’ll make better strategic decisions about how and when to source raw materials, while ensuring compliance with regional or country-specific regulations.
Time is Money
From airlines trying to reroute grounded planes, flight crews, and passengers to process manufacturers optimizing thousands of product formulations across an ever-changing set of sourcing, pricing, and production decisions, SAP HANA powers rapid evaluation of large volumes of complex data, dramatically improving decision making and performance in time-sensitive scenarios.
To find out more about how SAP HANA Services can help your company develop a customer solution to unlock business value from your complex, data-intensive, time-sensitive challenges, please visit us online.
