The Challenge
Sometimes capabilities and needs are mapped simply because of the pure timing of conversations. It was one such conversation that led Ignite to work with a global, FMCG company Kimberly-Clark, to kick-starting their considerable investment in HANA Enterprise.
Kimberly-Clark has a huge global supply chain network and wanted to leverage HANA to enable real time insights to find efficiency improvements and monitor performance. There was a need for guidance for design standards and best practice in utilising the HANA platform to acquire real-time sales insights, the effect of customer promotions, supply chain and equipment efficiency. Kimberly-Clark also needed to develop reporting solutions to measure all performance metrics.
Our Solution
After months of sourcing struggles, Kimberly-Clark decided a smarter, more flexible approach to undertaking data projects was needed. They turned to Ignite for proven experience in architecture and design leadership for HANA adoption – equipping themselves with the support of a fully-fledged data consultancy for their HANA implementation.
One of the key elements of this engagement was to empower Kimberly-Clark’s internal staff to be self-sustaining with customised coaching and training.
As the go-to partners for any HANA development at Kimberly-Clark, Ignite delivered four complex end-to-end implementations. They were involved right from requirement gathering to go-live activities, developing a thorough understanding of their business issues, enabling Ignite to deliver optimal solutions leveraging HANA. This included providing input into the creation of HANA architecture principles and guidelines to set the design standards for Kimberly-Clark’s initiatives moving forward.
Build data products to realise repeatable and sustainable business value from data.
- Data Driven Apps
- Customised User Dashboards
- Customised Business Intelligence Reports
- Recommendation Engines
- Measure asset utilisation
- Built-in Artificial Intelligence
“Ignite deliver. You not only get what you asked for, you also get value added partnership helping with strategic thinking and advanced analytics opportunities.”
Results
The deliverables included a series of successful HANA initiatives that provided real-time global insight into Kimberly-Clark’s supply chain, across four disparate regions and source systems.
Sales & Promotion
The first solution was designed to provide a base data set and reporting capabilities across customer promotion and sales data. Along with delivering high performance data models, Ignite delivered the ETL jobs in Data Services to get the required data from SQL systems to HANA. The solution helped Kimberly-Clark successfully understand the correlation between various promotions and their ongoing effect on sales.
Order Performance
The second project was to provide global information on sales and deliveries to customers to track performance of orders that are delivered on time and in full. The data was replicated from four disparate regional ECC systems which had to be cleaned, modified, and combined to provide real-time reporting on their consolidated global supply chain. The aim of this information was to provide insights into the global supply chain and track order performance and identify reasons for failures, through a consistent, seamless single view.
Equipment Efficiency
The third solution captured equipment utilisation information from multiple systems and merged them in HANA to understand the overall equipment efficiency. This allowed them to measure the full design capacity effectiveness and the maximum possible production during scheduled hours at optimal speed. This information empowered the operations team with effective analytics required to capture cost saving opportunities.
Supply Chain Performance
The fourth solution was aimed at providing end-to-end supply chain reporting for the management team with a weekly update of activities linked to planning, root cause analysis, inventory reduction and demand and supply analysis. With the help of this solution, the supply chain management team had access to a single report to measure metrics such as production cycle time, forecast accuracy, adherence to schedule, daily ‘out of stocks’, inventory quantity and many more.
Future Proofed
While delivering these projects, Ignite discovered that the organisation needed global master data models which could be used across all projects. Ignite took the initiative to develop and deliver these models, which brought uniformity and decreased duplication of effort.
Ignite realised that non-SAP reporting tools such as Tableau and QlikView posed performance issues when working with HANA as a data source. The team took steps to understand the challenge and deliver models that were optimised to give the best possible performance with these tools.
By staying on top of the fast-changing pace of HANA, Ignite made sure they brought the latest skills to all projects.
Where to next?
The partnership ensured that Kimberly-Clark were able to meet their goals around the delivery of global supply chain and sales analytics solutions. Critical to this success was our design coordination across several simultaneous projects delivered by Ignite Data, internal staff, and system integrators.
This engagement involved collaboration with project resources that were spread across four different global regions and accompanying time zones. As a result, Ignite set realistic timeline predictions allowing for these time zone and communication constraints. The team was able to highlight gaps in the delivery methodology early, especially those where agile expectations were not aligned with the business.
Ignite was successful in unifying the disparate supply chain data sources to develop live models that have become the single trusted source of truth with the goal of making relevant information available to the business. Kimberly-Clark is now able to tap their live global supply chain data to generate reports that bring measurable improvements to their organisation.
Technologies
- SAP HANA
