Rethinking business

28 September 2016 by Johan Francken in Enterprise Resource Planning, 0 comment(s)

SAP keeps hammering home arguments we all know: ensure more relevant decision-making, respond faster to an economic and competitive environment, facilitate cost-effective changes, optimise operational processes and reduce risks, and release the value of structured and non-structured data. Clearly, there was a pre-HANA period full of constraints and restrictions, and now there’s HANA, a door that’s wide open.

“It’s more than a new type of technology, it’s a whole new way of processing information”, says Johan Francken, Head of Cloud Applications Management at NRB. The origin is known: speed of access to data from the memory rather than on disk, storage in columns rather than in lines, and dividing operations across several processors in parallel. And we know that this method of processing offers much better performances compared to the traditional model involving disk-based data storage. “We calculated that certain processes could be done hundreds or even thousands of times faster, which is huge. And besides performance, I see it as a great opportunity for businesses to redesign their way of working, their business processes and sometimes even their business models”.

Behind the technology, the philosophy: Real Time

The SAP HANA solution has been natively designed to optimise application processing time. Creating a financial report, which up until now took several weeks or even months in some cases, can be completed in just a few hours. How do I prepare myself? What’s the best way of taking advantage of this instantaneousness? Our role is to help our clients seize a great opportunity and gain a competitive advantage that will act as an efficiency-booster in terms of decision-making.

HANA can be connected to practically anything, from mobile apps to social media, resulting in new opportunities for standing out on today’s competitive markets. “The technology allows us to very quickly try out new scenarios and enables you to get ahead of competition”, Francken explains. “As well as gains in performance, it provides you the resources to rethink your business processes and applications, to optimise and then innovate”.

Let’s take the example of a sales force. Running SAP on HANA brings more than just greater efficiency: not only will the teams work faster, they will also work better, as HANA helps analyse management operations using significant volumes of detailed operational data in real time during transactions. McKinsey consultants, who have published a study on effective use of data by companies, estimate that in the world of logistics, improved data exploitation would allow operating margins to increase by more than 60%. Talking about a no-brainer!

Forget everything and start from scratch?

“Rethinking doesn’t mean rebuilding. That would be quite simply unimaginable and pointless,” says Francken. “The gradual stages of implementation that SAP suggests allow for the non-disruptive integration of this technology. Businesses can adopt it for analytical and decision-making type projects with a high ROI and in non-critical environments”. The publisher’s offers help eliminate two recurring problems in these fields: the fact that historical data and production data are still in two separate worlds, and the rigidity of complex analyses. HANA being available in the cloud means shorter development test phases. For NRB, the combination of a public and a private cloud (aka hybrid cloud) is a new deployment option to think about. It allows to combine flexibility in provisioning with integration within the IT environments of companies.

As a conclusion, SAP HANA early birds made the track. Now customers need to decide on being part of the early majority and keep or be one step ahead of the competition. NRB one-stop-shop can help you through the whole adoption life cycle up to the maintenance of your solutions. It is about discovery, business & technical transformation, operations, SAP HANA as a Service, licence sales, support and maintenance.