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JohnMcDonnell
Advisor
Advisor

In 2010 SAP launched the game-changing SAP HANA platform, leveraging the power of in-memory technology to address growing data volumes and the complexity of system landscapes. With SAP HANA, SAP provides a modern suite of applications unifying analytics and transactions into a single in-memory platform. Today SAP HANA represents the fastest-growing product in SAP’s history.

New Reality of Real Time With Launch of SAP® High-Performance Analytic Appliance

December 01, 2010

www.sap.com/corporate-en/news.epx?pressid=14457

“Real-time” isn’t something new to SAP, it has been both delivering on and pursuing it from the onset.  In fact the first version of SAP's flagship enterprise software was a financial accounting system named R/1. The "R" was for "Real-time data processing" symbolizing the vision of SAP’s founders for “real-time” computing and software that processes data when customers ask it to rather than overnight in batches.  For over 40 years SAP has continued to pursue this ultimate objective even as business grew and technologies have changed by delivering R2 and R3.

Over the last 5-10 years we have seen the greatest shift ever in how we live, work, and do business. Today, we’re faced with a completely different world where consumers are mobile, socially connected, and have access to information instantly through the internet.  We live in a world where companies are global, information travels instantly, and markets move at breakneck speed.

Earlier this year SAP leveraged the power HANA to deliver a new modern ERP platform when it released the SAP Business Suite Powered by HANA capable of dealing with the realities of the environment that businesses operate in today.  It represents the next step in the journey and this generation’s “Real-Time” system.

SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA Reinvents the Real-Time Enterprise

January 10, 2013

http://www.news-sap.com/sap-business-suite-on-sap-hana-launch/

With the SAP Business Suite now powered by SAP HANA, SAP is simply combining together the best suite of applications (SAP Business Suite) and the next generation platform (SAP HANA), for driving your entire business in real-time.

John Deere was the first company to go live with SAP ERP powered by HANA.  Derek Dyer, director, Global SAP Services, Deere and Company said "… we aspire to improve our capability to make quicker decisions on design data, to gain real time insights on very large volumes of live data, and to see significant performance improvement in our new product introduction process. With these aspirations met, our next objective is to drive additional mission-critical processes in real time, provide self-service mobile connectivity to our business users and derive new business and IT value."

For Wholesale Distribution companies, competition from the ecosystem is creating more options for customers and putting more pressure on traditional distributors and traditional channels to evolve and innovate (manufacturers selling direct to consumer, Amazon and Google entering the space).  Currently, many core IT systems in this industry were built 15-20 years ago and are no longer sufficient and definitely not real-time.

As a distributor, your success depends on overcoming the challenges of these new competitors, shrinking margins, and more demanding customers. Whether you meet these challenges by improving sales or running your warehouse at a lower cost, you need accurate and timely business insight to make it all happen.

SAP introduced the Wholesale Distribution Industry solution in 2004 and many of the best-run Distributors’ companies have already made the leap to upgrade these out dated systems and to standardize their businesses with SAP’s Business Suite and SAP’s Industry Best Practices.  With this foundation in place, they are now innovating their businesses by using HANA’s real-time platform to bring more value to their customers.  These leaders are dramatically accelerating their business processes, empowering their people with real-time insights and ultimately staying ahead of the competition (several company examples are included below).

As an example, most distributors have the ability to view and understand their sales and profitability at an aggregate or consolidated level.  However many of the distributors highlighted in the examples below monitor these kinds of key metrics at a detailed line or order item level – by sales rep, individual customer, product, channel, branch, or specific deal – and do it all in real time. That capability is important because it allows these companies to uncover opportunities they would otherwise miss, resolve issues before they affect the bottom line and ultimately have a leg up on their competitors.

These stories provide just a glimpse of what can be accomplished by leveraging HANA.  By unifying transactional and analytical processing on the HANA platform, you keep your system lean and nimble; you can dramatically accelerate core business processes, and start to drive your entire business in real-time!

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Further information on Wholesale Distribution companies using HANA today:

  • Fast, Detailed, Actionable Analytics at Graybar  insiderPROFILES  David Hannon, Senior Features Editor

          http://insiderprofiles.wispubs.com/article.aspx?iArticleId=6739

 

  • Eby-Brown Speeds SAP NetWeaver BW and Financial Reporting   insiderPROFILES  Ken Murphy, Senior Writer

          http://insiderprofiles.wispubs.com/article.aspx?iArticleId=6991

 

  • Fill or Kill, AmerisourceBergen Partners with SAP to Accelerate Order Fulfillment and Delivery   insiderPROFILES  Lauren Bonneau, Managing Editor

          http://insiderprofiles.wispubs.com/article.aspx?iArticleId=6272

  • Spirits Distributor Serves Up Real-Time Business Intelligence - Charmer Sunbelt Group is using SAP’s new in-memory analytics tool to produce real-time data it hopes will speed up operations and lower costs   By Stephanie Overby  CIO.com  August 29, 2011

          http://www.cio.com/article/688770/Spirits_Distributor_Serves_Up_Real_Time_Business_Intelli...

Further information on HANA:

Go to http://www.saphana.com/welcome and www.sap.com/suiteonhana

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