STIHL: SAP BW powered by SAP HANA Delivers Leaner Structures for Faster Business Processes

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1 Picture Credit ANDREAS STIHL AG & Co. KG, Waiblingen, Germany. Used with permission. SAP Business Transformation Study Industrial Machinery and Components STIHL 2014 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. STIHL: SAP BW powered by SAP HANA Delivers Leaner Structures for Faster Business Processes ANDREAS STIHL AG & Co. KG makes tools with a bite. STIHL is the world s leading maker of chain saws and power tools for use in forestry and construction. Today, the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) application powered by the SAP HANA platform enables STIHL to analyze rapidly and report on huge amounts of data, accelerating key processes and supporting business growth.

2 Company ANDREAS STIHL AG & Co. KG Headquarters Waiblingen, Germany Industry Industrial machinery and components machinery and equipment Products and Services Chain saws, brush cutters, trimmers, lawn mowers, cut-off machines, blowers, garden shredders, accessories, and personal protection products Employees 13,844 (December 2013) Revenue 2.81 billion (2013) Web Site Partner Camelot ITLab GmbH BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION The company s top objectives Support profitable growth in a global business environment Accelerate analysis and reporting for faster insight Enable deeper, more detailed reporting on larger data volumes The resolution Performed proof-of-concept (PoC) analysis to assess benefits and achieve management buy-in Implemented the SAP HANA platform for the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) application Reduced complexities, simplified structures, and eliminated redundancies The key benefits Fast and efficient reporting for business-process optimization In-depth analysis for well-informed decisions and fact-based planning Capacity to embrace further data growth without additional human resources Read more Business users across the company are delighted. Analyses and reports that used to take up to several minutes are performed in seconds. Rolf Hemmrich, Staff Manager, Processes and IT Applications Data Warehouse, ANDREAS STIHL AG & Co. KG TOP BENEFITS ACHIEVED 11X Average faster reporting and analysis 40% Faster load procedures 4X Reduced database size after migration due to prior cleanup See more metrics 2 / 6

3 Time to accelerate the pace of business processes ANDREAS STIHL AG & Co. KG is the world s bestselling brand of chain saws. Founded in 1926 in the south of Germany, the company has expanded its business across the globe. Today, STIHL operates manufacturing plants in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Brazil, the United States, China, Hong Kong, and Japan. The company s products are sold through more than 40,000 STIHL-approved retailers in some 160 countries. STIHL makes its own chains, guide bars, and other components. STIHL products are known for their ease of use, first-rate ergonomics, power, and durability. The SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) application has proved its worth at STIHL. More and more business units rely on SAP BW for their specific needs. Currently, the company deploys 65 custom add-on applications for SAP BW. Increasingly, users at the STIHL business units experienced performance issues when generating reports or performing analysis. These issues were due to a rapid rise in the amount of data being handled, compounded by the growing granularity of data. Recently, STIHL decided to move its sales companies to the SAP ERP application. Consequently, the company s SAP BW application had to cope with a huge increase in data volumes plus additional reporting and analytics. Without the migration of SAP BW to the SAP HANA platform, the company s IT landscape would have been unable to support the necessary functionalities and deliver the expected performance. Enabling sales companies at the dealer level to use SAP BW has increased the number of our customers from 160 to 40,000. Without SAP HANA, we would be hard-pressed to do this. Rolf Hemmrich, Staff Manager, Processes and IT Applications Data Warehouse, ANDREAS STIHL AG & Co. KG 3 / 6

4 Smooth transition, compelling results In a proof-of-concept (PoC) analysis, the potential benefits of SAP BW powered by SAP HANA were assessed under real-life conditions at STIHL. During this three-month phase, experts from Camelot ITLab GmbH supported the IT organization at STIHL in the migration of its complex SAP BW software landscape to SAP HANA. The company s development system was migrated first, followed by the quality assurance and production systems. A system copy of the company s production SAP BW was used to create a sandbox for the PoC. STIHL switched to SAP BW 7.3 to pave the way for the physical migration to SAP HANA. Performance tests were conducted to establish benchmarks. STIHL used this opportunity to perform cleanup and housekeeping tasks in its SAP BW software environment. These measures helped keep hardware and licensing costs in check. More than 100 InfoProviders were converted to InfoProviders optimized for SAP HANA. With the hands-on involvement of Camelot, the IT team at STIHL migrated the sandbox to the SAP HANA platform. Tests on the new platform clearly indicated a major performance boost for key analysis and reporting tasks, including serial number tracking, profitability analysis, procurement information, and sales planning. The results of the PoC were compelling. Reporting had accelerated more than tenfold, helping the IT team at STIHL secure management buy-in for the full-fledged switch to SAP HANA. The PoC showed that using SAP BW on SAP HANA benefits the company. Users save time that can be devoted to more valuable tasks. Also, the speed of SAP HANA makes our reporting more responsive. Marc Gerber, Head of Business Application Development for Sales and Marketing, Finance, Controlling, and Business Intelligence,ANDREAS STIHL AG & Co. KG 4 / 6

5 Leaner structures, greater performance The switch to SAP HANA has delivered a major performance boost at STIHL. Queries and analyses that used to take minutes are now performed in seconds. For instance, sales planning and profitability analyses run 30 times faster than in the past. On average, reports are generated 11 times faster than before, encouraging users to rapidly walk through what-if scenarios to optimize outcomes. Data load procedures run up to 40% faster, largely due to the elimination of time-consuming aggregation, indexing, and statistics routines. Deletions have been accelerated by a factor of up to 20. The company s data volume was compressed from 1.3 TB to 300 GB after the initial migration. Two out of five data layers can potentially be eliminated, significantly reducing the data modeling effort for the company s application development teams. The SAP BW application development effort at STIHL could be reduced considerably in a number of cases. KEY BENEFITS 11X Average faster reporting and analysis 4X Reduced database size after migration due to prior cleanup 2 Data layers potentially eliminated out of 5 20X Faster deletion <40% Faster load procedures 5 / 6

6 STIHL Focus on the bottom line (14/11) The performance and productivity boost achieved through SAP HANA has significantly improved the standing of the IT organization at STIHL. Reduced administrative effort enables the IT team to handle future growth in terms of both data volume and application functionalities. In 2015, STIHL will switch to SAP BW 7.4 to benefit from further performance increases, greater degrees of freedom in handling objects, and the availability of new InfoProvider types. 6 / 6 Picture Credit ANDREAS STIHL AG & Co. KG, Waiblingen, Germany. Used with permission.

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