This was the first session I attended at ASUG Annual Conference this week and this session didn't disappoint. Tim Hays, CIO of Animal Health International, provided this excellent presentation. His BI architect, Mike Searle, was on hand to answer any technical questions.
In this session, Tim provided business reasons why Animal Health invested in HANA, and provided use cases to justify the HANA investment. They gave some real-world examples during this presentation. Below are my notes during the session.
At the start of the session, Tim said at first when they bought HANA, someone in the company said "what's this thing that we bought that sounds like a girl?"
Figure 1: Source: Animal Health
Figure 1 shows why Animal Health went with SAP HANA over a year ago. Note that some of the reasons are for BI performance improvements and innovations in BI.
Figure 2: Source: Animal Health
On this slide, he stated that "BI drives their business" which I thought was interesting. You can see all the examples in Figure 2 how BI helps drive their business.
According to Tim, the HANA investment includes HANA licenses, HANA appliances / hardware, upgrade of existing systems and an experienced HANA consultant. Note this was HANA on-premise, as a cloud option was not available at the time.
Figure 3: Source: Animal Health
Figure 3 shows example numbers of a HANA investment. I didn't have time to note the details of the costs.
Where to find the $2M to invest in HANA?
Figure 4: Source: Animal Health
Figure 4 shows a way to fund the $2 million investment.
Tim also discussed stratifying customers into groups to improve relationships and processes, similar to the way the hotel and airline industries do. Many companies do not do this today.
Figure 5: Source: Animal Health
Figure 5 shows a best practice for grouping customers. How do you measure customer loyalty? Look at indicators such as buying power, profitability, customer rebates.
Figure 6: Source: Animal Health
Figure 6 shows the business story behind Animal Health and what each role needs to look at.
Figure 7: Source: Animal Health
Figure 7 shows that using stratification, Animal Health found that fewer than 500 items generated 75% of their revenue. Through another report, they found that 3,600 inventory items generated the last 1% of revenue. This is important information for the company to know. They also had reports for pricing optimization
Figure 8: Source: Animal Health
Figure 8 shows why Animal Health felt HANA was necessary and how it enabled them to do the inventory and pricing optimization. They had a dramatic reduction in ETL time.
Before deploying HANA, they researched Upgrade / Migration - General | SAP HANA
They reviewed SAP HANA Memory Usage Explained | SAP HANA
They read the master guides at Implement | SAP HANA
They read the latest SAP notes.
They followed the sizing guide at service.sap.com/sizing
They also had to make decisions such as having a parallel landscape during migration, virtualization and explored disaster recovery options.
Figure 9: Source: Animal Health
Figure 9 shows the key learnings from justifying HANA. Tim also said there was no increase in staffing to implement HANA. He also said "if I can do it you can do it".
It was a great session to start the conference. I thank Tim Hays and Mike Searle for this great presentation.
As gretchen.lindquist says My take-aways and verdicts on #ASUG2014 and #SAPPHIRENow ASUG Sessions = Yea (or YAY)
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