State-of-the-art KPI-Reporting with self-service BI tools and more besides: The Hager Group is introducing SAP BW/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud

In both private homes and industrial and commercial properties, power distribution systems, electric distributors and media distributors ensure that electricity and digital data arrive quickly, safely and exactly where they are needed. The innovative and easy-to-assemble quality products from the Hager Group (based in Blieskastel in Germany’s Saarland region) are used for this very purpose in many construction projects. Examples include installation distributors, switchgear, protective devices, cable routing and room connection systems or ranges of switches and building controls.

The owner-managed group of companies – which has 22 production facilities in ten countries and over 100sales locations worldwide – is a leading provider of solutions for electrotechnical installations in real estate. In2021, it generated sales of €2.6 billion with a workforce of more than 1,000 employees.

If the Hager Group is to strengthen and further expand its position on the market as part of its long-term growthstrategy, above all else it needs to be smart and highly targeted in managing its business activities. To do this, itrequires highly efficient reporting that gives a clear view of current key performance indicators – ideally at anytime, anywhere and on any terminal device, not to mention in a clearly visualized format and in any desired level of detail.

With SAP BW/4HANA as the latest-generation data warehousing solution, in combination with SAP Analytics Cloud as the BI frontend and for self-service BI, the corporate group is now moving a great deal closer to achieving this goal. “The SAP solutions are futureproof, because they are constantly being further developed and offer the state-of-the-art technologies we need to implement modern, optimized and standardized KPI reporting,” commented Adamo Greco (Head of Business Warehousing at the Hager Group).

The new applications replace reporting with SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) and Microsoft Excel. SAP BW was primarily used by business users as a data source to create reports locally in Excel. Over the years, this approach had created a “shadow BI” system with a multitude of individual reports, so a large number of queries was required to retrieve data.

Many things will become easier for business users too. Business users perform queries on live data obtainedfrom SAP BW/4HANA in SAP Analytics Cloud in the form of self-service BI (i.e. independently of IT) – and it doesn’t matter whether they do so on a desktop computer or on a mobile device such as a smartphone ortablet. But that’s not all. These queries can also be performed at any level of detail, down to document and singleitem level, which is a major plus.

As a result, business users can now link and evaluate KPIs from different divisions (e.g. Quality Management’s KPIs with Shipping’s KPIs) and gain new insights into the business – a completely competitive consideration.Controlling can also use this method to precisely calculate sales with a customer and thus also any bonus payments made to them.

Since SAP Analytics Cloud provides KPI reports in a compact, clear and easy-to-understand manner in modern dashboards at the touch of a button, it also eliminates the effort involved in extracting and preparing data created during Excel reporting. This eases the burden on business users, giving them more scope for core tasks such as interpreting the figures. Another advantage is the ability to flexibly navigate and annotate KPI reports.

All of this helps to ensure that the roughly 500 end users – many of whom do not have in-depth knowledge of BW – enjoy working with and are actively using the new BI solutions.

Hager is also drawing specific benefits from the optimized BI content for SAP BW/4HANA (known as “BIContent Add-Ons”). These add-ons can be used to comprehensively analyze all the core divisions – such asSales, Logistics, Controlling, Finance or Quality Management – in the existing SAP ERP system

For instance, evaluating profit center accounting or managing the inventory of all 22 production facilities or thesales generated by around 60 sales companies is now an absolute breeze. At present, there are twelve BIContent Add-Ons in use, and more are to be implemented one step at a time. SAP ERP data isn’t the only data that SAP BW/4HANA evaluates. It also assesses quotation data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, a CRMapplication. The data is imported into BW over an interface for this very purpose.

ORBIS AG was tasked with implementing SAP BW/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud – Hager is also making good use of its planning functions. The Saarbrücken-based IT service provider has extensive BI consulting and process expertise in the SAP environment and has already been responsible for several SAP projects at Hager.

Thanks to the ORBIS experts’ know-how and the trusting cooperative relationship maintained between all the parties involved at all times, implementation (which followed the greenfield approach) was both smooth and quick. The in-depth user training – which was based on the proven coaching approach, provided by the ORBIS consultants and ensured knowledge transfer at an early stage – also made a major contribution to this development.

The ORBIS experts also provided the internal project team with advice and support in terms of deciding to switch straight from SAP BW to SAP BW/4HANA. So Hager is benefiting directly from the advantages the current BWsolution offers – with respect to the likes of the lean LSA++ architecture, simple data modelling, efficient datamanagement, extremely short loading times and data access almost in real time.

Adamo Greco summed up the situation positively:

And the story continues at Hager. The company is planning to provide new reporting areas, and to extend and refine existing ones, while introducing additional BI Content Add-Ons. Adamo Greco and his team are keen toencourage even more business users to use self-service BI too.