The Client

The client is the biggest listed company in Vietnam’s Stock Exchange in terms of market value, operating in the food and dairy product manufacturing industry. They dominate Vietnam’s market with products such as milk, candy, frozen food and coffee. Distribution is run through a nation wide network of whole sale dealers.

Requirements

With such a huge network of supply chains, it was crucial that information was consolidated and extracted at speed.

The company already implemented the distribution management system (DMS) to facilitate local management of dealers’ business nationwide. Next came the most important need of of enabling 2 way communications

• Data needed to be consolidated from DMS to the client’s headquarter.

• Data needed to be exploited efficiently

• Promotion and market strategy which is centrally managed had to be able to take effect locally

Duration: 11 months

Challenges

From the implementation point of view, it’s very challenging to setup data loading procedures harmonizing at every local dealer. Every local dealer needs to strictly follow standards setup by headquarter in terms of data, schedule, and business process closing to ensure that the correct data is sent to the headquarters.

In addition, as communication is offline due to lack of network coverage., some data communication was manual which becomes error prone if the operation is not performed strictly to standard.

From a technological point of view, a strong BI platform was required. Such a BI platform needed to demonstrate the data warehousing performance to host and process a huge amount of data from more than 200 sites. The BI platform also needed to have outstanding reporting capability in order to gives users almost unlimited perspective of business data.

Solutions

FPT Software SAP Business Service Division offered the client SAP BI on netweaver 2004s platform, a truly open and scalable integration platform running on top of SQL Server 2005 database engine.

The reason for SAP BI is to leverage existing customer’s investment on the SAP R/3 and SAP CRM packages. With SAP BI, integration with those components became an off-the-shelf work package.

Our team implemented the BW data warehousing architecture to consolidate data from 4 different sources: DMS, CRM, SAP BPS (running on top of BW) and SAP R/3 (ERP).

At the staging layer, staging and extraction engines were built to load and transform data into standard infocube.

For business planning and simulation, we built planning applications on top of SAP BW to help the corporation manage the process of interactive planning, investment analysis and plan/actual comparisons.

On the platform level, various advanced tuning techniques were applied to achieve the best database performance on SQL Server 2005.

Technologies Used: SQL Server 2005, SAP Netweaver 2004s, SAP BI 7.0.

Benefits to Customer

The implementation had a great impact on the efficiency of our client’s business. Never before could the marketing and sales department have such quick and insightful access to market information. It could tightly control various marketing and promotion campaigns right down to the end consumer level.

Also, with SAP BI, the planning process was able to become an interactive process rather than an idle once a year task as it was before.

Now, they are able to monitor their plan vs. actual  every minute, allowing them to adjust the planning figures at the speed of business reality.