Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 05 | Page 64

CASE STUDY BECAUSE SAP HANA PROVIDES AN EXTREMELY RELIABLE PLATFORM FOR THE SAP BUSINESS WAREHOUSE SOLUTION, WE HAVE PEACE OF MIND THAT EVERYTHING WILL CONTINUE WORKING AS IT SHOULD. CHALLENGE Packaging and paper specialist Mondi has achieved enormous success in its industry. Having grown rapidly both organically and through acquisitions, the company posted a record year in 2015. To enable managers to easily measure consistent key performance indicators (KPIs) from year to year, Mondi integrates acquired companies into its core SAP ERP systems, which include customer relationship management and supplier relationship management, as soon as possible. As a result, data volumes and user numbers for the SAP applications have swelled dramatically. Mondi aggregates data from each business segment’s instance of SAP ERP into a central SAP Business Warehouse solution, to enable a single source of truth for enterprise- wide reporting and analysis. As the data repository grew, system response times 64 INTELLIGENTCIO started to suffer and staff sometimes had to wait a significant time for specific reports. Rainer Steffl, Chief Information Officer at Mondi Group, explained: “Detailed reporting and analysis is more important to decision- making than ever and to match the pace of business, it needs to be fast. We recognised that sluggish report generation threatened to dull our competitive edge. “What’s more, we wanted to broaden the scope of our analyses and make our predictive models even more accurate. “Ultimately, we wanted to be able to answer increasingly complex questions, such as: How can we increase return on capital? Why is this manufacturing plant more profitable than the others? In which markets are we most likely to achieve growth? Where should we make our next acquisitions? To gain rapid access to insights like these, we would need to store and analyse even larger data volumes extremely quickly. We set out to find a solution that could deliver the capabilities we needed.” TRANSFORMATION Mondi decided to migrate its SAP Business Warehouse system to the leading-edge SAP HANA database, which uses columnar structures to enable lightning-fast data analysis. For expert support during the complex migration, Mondi chose to engage an external partner and selected IBM Services. Rainer Steffl commented: “Because we have been working with IBM for over 10 years on around 30 different projects, we decided to approach IBM immediately. We have built up enormous mutual trust between our IT team and IBM and over the years, IBM has consistently demonstrated that it offers outstanding expertise and the best value for money. www.intelligentcio.com