CASE STUDY | Analytics Roadmap & SAP BW/4Hana Greenfield

CASE STUDY
Milestone has assisted several customers over the years in the analysis and building of their Analytics Roadmap. The Analytics Roadmap is an analysis of the state of maturity of an organisation’s analytics and a proposal of cost-benefit options of the architecture/processes to be followed in the short and medium-long term. Once roles/responsibilities/processes have been defined and the technology chosen by the customer, we proceed with the instantiation of these processes in analytics solutions/tools and/or other solutions (complementary tools for testing, incident management, etc. can be used depending on maturity).
Generg, a company dedicated to the exploitation of power generation plants using renewable sources, entrusted Milestone with the implementation of an analytics solution powered by BW4 Hana.
Challenge: Select an analytics solution with an open, scalable, user-friendly platform for the key users in its operation.
Solution: In the case of Generg, after defining the Analytics Roadmap and the solution’s governance models, the tools selected and implemented were SAP BW/4Hana, for the data warehousing component, and MS Power BI, for the information exploitation/dashboarding component.
Project: Greenfield implementation of SAP BW/4Hana (in a first phase for the financial component) with information available fed into MS Power BI dashboards. The roles in the organisation were defined (information areas, roles, information owners, information users), as were the processes (life cycle, responsibilities, approval flows) and the analytics architecture (tools to be used, access restrictions, growth mode, integration with planning tools, consolidation, and other processes).
Outcome: Generg now has a governance model tailored to its reality, detailing its different areas and setting out the rules to be followed in subsequent implementations to be carried out according to the Roadmap. Scalable guidelines/best practices/processes were established in order to encourage linear growth and extend the use of analytics solutions across the organisation. It includes a data warehouse as the pillar of data collection in all its aspects (SAP and non-SAP sources, metadata definition, business rules, etc.) and that is now the fulcrum of information distribution to the reporting layers. Generg is thus empowered, within the context of digital transformation, to enter the third platform (mobility, cloud, social business and bigdata/analytics). The organisation can evolve into increasingly predictive and prescriptive models, turning its data into valuable assets.
Testimonial from: Miguel Bradford Ferreira (IT da Generg)
The purpose of this project was to lay the foundations for the exploitation/production of a range of indicators, reporting and dashboarding based on the information collected/generated by our SAP ERP and its various modules used in our organisation. The clear ease of use that BW/4HANA brings will allow us to achieve a relevant degree of independence in the processing of information once it is made available in our BW environment. Moreover, the solution’s ability to communicate with other source systems allows us to position the BW as the central repository of organisational information. This data can also be used in data exploitation applications outside the SAP universe, adding a new opportunity to improve the dissemination of information to the various stakeholders, complementing the already established Analysis for Office.
The combination of a SAP back-end and a Microsoft front-end brought us interesting challenges, but which, with the help of the project team, were gradually overcome/mitigated. We are confident that, with the right specialist support, we have a winning combination when it comes to maintaining and expanding the analytics area of our organisation.
Contact us for more information: milestone@milestone.pt / www.milestone.pt
Carina Sousa
Analytics Manager
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