Nippon Paint China Transforms Big Data into Market Insight

[Former Member]

Nippon Paint entered China in 1992 and evolved into the market leader in construction, automobile, general industrial, coil and powder paint. In the past 20 years, we have achieved rapid business growth thanks to our continuous product innovation, quality service and investment in IT.

Nippon Paint is a long time SAP ERP user and has recently adopted BW on HANA, CRM on HANA and HANA Live. We have leveraged SAP Rapid Deployment solutions, based on SAP Best Practices, to make these innovation adoptions simpler and faster. We are very proud to be the benchmark user of SAP HANA in China and we continue the innovation by developing custom applications using SAP HANA technology to transform big data into market insight.

Nippon Paint runs a public website called iColor tailored to vast pool of consumers, designers, decoration companies and channels. We believe the data generated by the website contains answers to critical business issues. How to quickly transform the massive data into valuable market insights for business actions came to our agenda.

We decided to use HANA to build an analytics platform for iColor. We are fully convinced by SAP HANA’s analytics power and want to leverage our knowhow in SAP HANA applications to explore new opportunities while fully utilize existing IT resources such as Hadoop. The platform uses Hadoop system for infinite storage and for primary analysis of non-structured data, before storing the results in HIVE.  Data at small amount can be accessed directly from HIVE via HANA’s Smart Data Access tool while large data is acquired via SAP Data Service and loaded into SAP HANA for high-speed, real-time analysis and display.

The analytics platform, built on the architecture of seamlessly integrated SAP HANA and Intel’s Hadoop systems, perfectly combines the capabilities of non-structured data analysis on Hadoop system and real-time analysis of structured data with SAP HANA.  It is a simple logic but solves a big problem in handling big data.

SAP HANA accelerates the way we acquire, analyze and act on big data on social media. We can now capture consumer behaviors in a much accurate way, such as their preferences on colors, design styles and designers. The 360-degree view of customer information helps ensure more focused, targeted marketing campaigns, customer interactions and sales initiatives. The firsthand information on color trends and customer requirements on product features benefits the R & D team from developing quality products to address the unique market needs. The analytics platform powered by SAP HANA helps us become smarter and more efficient in marketing, sales and product development.