Performance increases with SAP HANA make the night long enough for DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH to support its ambitious growth plans

[bernd_steinhauer]

With 7,500 employees and up to 30 million parcels delivered per month, DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH is the leading German player in business-to-business (B2B) parcel delivery services.  The booming e-commerce business has driven the ambitious expansion of DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH into the growing business-to-consumer (B2C) market where the company was able to win new major customers, such as Amazon.

One impact of this strategic realignment is a significant increase of parcels to be delivered and invoiced. Therefore the company needed to improve the performance of its mission-critical billing and invoicing application to ensure the timely and correct processing of a growing transaction volume. In the so called mediation and rating process, the price of completed parcel delivery services is determined in a batch process running over night so that the results are available for invoicing during the day.

Before migrating its SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management solution to SAP HANA, system performance had already been stretched at times. Batch processing was still running by the time employees came into the office  a situation that could potentially lead to delays in the overall invoicing process and also put undue pressure on the finance team during monthly closing.

To avoid serious performance issues at peak times going forward, DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH decided to migrate its SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management solution to SAP HANA. It set up a very ambitious project plan with the objective to support the busy holiday season with the new system.

DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH took several measures to ensure a timely and smooth migration:

• upgrade its SAP Convergent Invoicing package with lots of custom code and migrate the SAP Billing and Management solution to the SAP HANA platform in one step by using the database migration option (DMO)
• use code impact analysis tools to determine which pieces of codes were affected by the migration to SAP HANA
• participate in the customer care program for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA to ensure a close collaboration with SAP experts

DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH already benefited from SAP HANA during the migration itself:

For the first time, the company was able to validate 20 million data sets running on the old system with 20 million data sets running on the new SAP HANA system in less than 2 minutes. The results were exactly identical for both data sets and this internal quality assurance measure gave DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH the confidence to make the switch to the new system.

The project was completed in less than five months – just in time for the start of the holiday season which DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH was able to smoothly support with the new SAP HANA system. Performance issues are now a thing of the past and the results have been impressive:

Even without additional custom code optimizations, system performance for the automated mediation and rating process increased by 20% and is expected to improve by another 30 % after the respective optimization measures.

But already now, the night is long enough again for DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH to run all batch processes in time.

The company was further able to reduce the selection of incorrect mediation data for the subsequent manual rerating process from 30 minutes to 30 seconds.

By upgrading its SAP Convergent Invoicing package and migrating SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management to the SAP HANA platform, DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH laid the foundation to handle an double-digit volume growth annually. The higher performance of SAP HANA enables the timely processing of an increased volume of business transactions and enables employees to complete time critical tasks, such as manual re-rating or the monthly closing process much faster and in due time.

Mr. Bernd Steinhauer, IT Project Lead of DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH, summarizes: “Since migrating to SAP HANA, we have seen a 20% performance improvement in our business-critical mediation and rating process. And we expect an additional 30% improvement after various optimization measures. We are now in a position to fully support the strategic expansion into the B2C market.”

Future plans of DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH include the optimization of the custom code for the SAP HANA platform. In addition to this, the company intends to fully activate BIT functionality within SAP Convergent Invoicing for further performance improvements. But already today DPD GeoPost (Deutschland) GmbH is in a solid position to avoid bottlenecks at peak times and successfully continue its expansion in the business-to-consumer (B2C) market.