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vincentdechandon
Contributor

Hi fellow readers.


Even if the economic rise of China has slowed down a bit in the last few years, it remains one of the biggest - if the not the biggest - when it comes to potential businesses. Growth has also brought more competition and a therefore demand for better business insights.


To address this evolving economic environment, many Chinese companies are arming themselves to make sure they remain in a leadership position in their territories, and still conquer new markets. And let's be clear, they have money to invest to tool up with proven products. This is especially true in the Business Intelligence world, where SAP is one of the most well-known solution providers when it comes to ROI.


Still, each country has its specificities, and China is not an exception to this universal rule. Also when you speak to a Chinese firm, and showcase convincing Web Intelligence, Lumira or Design Studio capacities, you better use business use-cases located in China. If a retail company has most of its accounts in Shanghai, they want to see a retail demo on that same city.



SAP China was already addressing this core demo requirement with business-centric dashboards but was struggling with the location analytics part: prospective clients want to see city administrative boundaries, customer sales territories, and more than all they want to use chinese basemap providers, like Baidu.


This is a major requirement is not satisfied by self-service BI vendors – with the exception of SAP as you will discover by reading this blog.


Few weeks ago, I attended with one of my colleagues the SAP Solution Hub, in SAP NA Headquarters in Newton Square. There we met SAP China teams, and discussed their needs, and how we could help their fulfillment.


After PoC done on the fly, they were impressed by the results and we scheduled other meetings to define the best way to work together, helping them to bring more value to Chinese prospects and customers.


From there, in less than three weeks, Baidu Maps were integrated within Galigeo For Lumira, and first demos about retail and manufacturing were created, to finally fill all needs and requirements of Chinese companies.


Here is some live footage of one of the demos, naturally located in Shanghai :


 



Even with Baidu Maps natively integrated, the user will of course still have all product features available.


Here, the sales revenues are first viewed aggregated to Shanghai districts, and then a drill-down is performed, letting the user see the sales revenue per shop at a street level. The basemap used is the standard Baidu Maps.


 



Still on the Baidu Maps, you have here an heatmap view of sales revenue per shop



 Integration of Baidu Maps in Galigeo solutions has been trivial due to the product architecture.


Here, you see three different types of basemaps provided by Baidu (Maps, Satellite and Roads), all of them being usable in Galigeo For Lumira of course. 



Users can select the data from the map, filter them, export them to Excel for deeper analysis...



Everything stays interactive in Story mode, and  bidirectionnal-BI works out of the box.


Next steps is now to build the same demos for Web Intelligence and Design Studio.


The moral of this story is that the partners ecosystem SAP has built for decades pays off and serves the purpose. It clearly improves SAP reps capacity to answer strategic business use-cases worldwide. Because of course this example with China is replicable all over the world.


From our side, these meetings with SAP China teams turn to be really rewarding, opening new markets that look promising.


And of course, at the end, this is always the customer that will benefit from such cooperation, with the powerful tools and expertise brought at their fingertips.


See, it’s a win/win/win process.


Thanks to Terence, Nina, Albert and the rest of SAP China teams for this great collaboration.



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