National DCP, Pioneer for Business Suite on HANA, Set to Go-Live in October

[Former Member]

Chances are, you’ve passed by a Dunkin’ Donuts in the past few days – maybe you even stopped and bought yourself a doughnut. But do you know where all those doughnuts come from?

National DCP (NDCP) plans to service over 7,000 Dunkin’ Donuts franchisees using Business Suite on HANA. They are one of SAP’s first customers to implement Business Suite on HANA, and they’re set to go live at the end of October.

“When you look at this project, it touches all aspects of our company. It touches the distribution centers, it touches our national DCP employees, it impacts our vendors who we do business with, as well as ultimately our franchisees and store managers,” said NDCP CIO Darrell Riekena.

The customer has been testing Business Suite on HANA as a way to track end-users’ sales orders requests in the distribution chain. Around 80% of all sales orders for the week are created between 9:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. on Wednesdays. With over 300 users logging into the system to create sales orders with roughly 250 line items per order, there will be a heavy load on the system that needs to be optimized.

The customer was observing an increased sales order execution time – before they implemented Business Suite on HANA, their Legacy system with limited functionality took about five seconds to create a large sales order. With Business Suite on HANA, the execution time jumped to 55 seconds for a large sales order, and the lag time was making both end-users and the customer anxious.

The team looked into the customer’s business process and end users’ requirements, and tried to give them several business processing and technical changes. They also suggested performance improvement tips and looked into SAP’s standard business processes for areas of improvement.

In the end, ensuring that the customer implemented best practices and trimming down the system code was all it took to knock the sales order execution time down to under 20 seconds – which the customer considered optimal execution time.

Now, the customer is back on schedule set to go-live by the end of October. Additionally, they now have the freedom to explore other customization parameters. The team has managed to identify more issues in Suite on HANA, allowing the customer ample time to implement low tests and performance processing integration well before they officially go live.

This holistic, continuous HANA engagement is not only beneficial to the customer; since NDCP is one of SAP’s first customers implementing Suite on HANA, this gives the Deployment Team a valuable opportunity to gauge user experience with customers when they purchase the business platform. One major part of user experience is user expectation – what the customer expects to see improved with Suite on HANA.

Without any further systemic issues, the HANA Deployment Team’s focus has shifted to improving the system’s entire end-to-end efficiency. At the end of the day, what the Deployment Team is accomplishing is simplifying the business interactions between customer and end-users through improving business processes on all fronts – ordering, demand management, as well as the customer’s call centers.

Sujoy Chowdhary and Ravi Puvvadi are two members of the HANA Deployment Team, and have been working closely with NDCP for their Business Suite on HANA project. Many thanks to both of them for their contributions to this article.

Published by AGS Coe NA, Jenni Lu