Alicorp implemented SAP HANA to leverage its business planning and to improve predictions of its customer´s buying behavior
Authored by Marco Flores Ramirez
Alicorp, the largest Peruvian consumer goods company has manifested its need to perform statistical analysis in order to determine and analyze the buying behavior of its customers and to identify agile and efficient selling opportunities. Thus the organization utilizes a high volume of information within its IT architecture for the analysis of the numerous product and customer data. Based on statistical analysis, Alicorp intends to interpret and forecast the buying behavior of its customers in order to optimize supply as well as to identify potential selling opportunities. For this purpose, the company had already deployed its business warehouse that offered the complexity of various data analysis but with performance limitations due to huge data amounts deriving from the large product portfolio. To master these limitations, SAP HANA with its in-memory processing, real-time availability and its predictive analysis capabilities, was chosen.
One key challenge was the efficient knowledge transfer because the corporate data was already structured in reports and due to the implementation of HANA, tables had to be replicated and configured. Furthermore, the business logic that resided in business warehouse, including many analytical views and hierarchies with a high complexity, had to be replicated also in the HANA based solution. To approach this issue, Alicorp and SAP decided as a first implementation step to take some tables as data source (transactional and master data) from the SAP Netweaver DEX and SAP ECC system. These models were replicated in SAP HANA through the SAP SLT and by SAP Predictive Analysis for further analysis and mining. As this approach was successful, Alicorp was in a position to replicate the respective features of the business warehouse and simultaneously utilizing the in-memory speed capabilities of HANA to increase the data compression by five times.
The company is now able to retrieve financial and sales reports of all respective sales areas in real-time and this enables Alicorp to take decisions much faster. This improves the response times to customer needs and inventory changes as well as it saves time of the employees which can now be used for strategic or analytical tasks. Utilizing the real-time availability and the predictive analysis capabilities of SAP HANA significantly enhanced Alicorp´s capabilities in terms of data processing and advanced its business planning processes to a new level.