E.ON Energie Kundenservice: Getting the Most Out of Data with SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA

Transcription

1 customer logo here E.ON Energie Kundenservice: Getting the Most Out of Data with SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA E.ON Energie Kundenservice GmbH had a treasure trove of insights deep within its 6 million customers worth of energy consumption and sales data, but access was far too slow. E.ON Energie Kundenservice consolidated its data in the cloud using the SAP Business Warehouse application powered by SAP HANA, making analysis at the individual customer level practical and delivering many bottom-line benefits.

2 Company E.ON Energie Deutschland GmbH Headquarters Munich, Germany Industry Utilities Products and Services Energy solutions and services Employees 3,000 Web Site Partners E.ON Business Services, Global Service & Support organization from SAP BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION Objectives Consolidate two SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) applications Increase the performance and scalability of the consolidated platform for better decision support and data reconciliation Enable individual consumption and revenue forecasts for 6 million customer accounts Engaged E.ON Business Services and the Service & Support organization from SAP for implementation Merged warehouses and migrated from Oracle to the SAP HANA platform Deployed the consolidated warehouse in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service with SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence (BI) solutions as its front end Benefits Greatly increased performance, enabling data analysis at the individual level Improved data quality and consistency while speeding financial close processes Enabled speedier collection of overdue invoices and unbilled revenue Laid a foundation for smart metering and other innovations 62% Reduction in data load time for sales statistics 86% 99% Reduction in query response time for sales statistics 10X Database volume compression The migration to SAP HANA has made our reporting applications future proof with little effort and enables us to further consolidate on the SAP HANA platform. Andreas Götz, Retail Solutions Germany, E.ON Business Services GmbH 2 / 6

3 Opening new analysis doors by moving to a flexible, future-proof BI system E.ON Energie Deutschland GmbH is one of Germany s leading energy suppliers. Because of fundamental changes occurring in the country s energy sector, E.ON Energie Kundenservice GmbH, the sales and service unit of E.ON Energie Deutschland, is simplifying its operations so it can react nimbly to market developments. One big step the company recently made was to merge its retail sales organizations into one. This required combining two instances each of the key software that runs the business: SAP for Utilities solutions, the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application, and SAP BW. SAP BW is the underlying business intelligence engine used by the other software to analyze and forecast energy consumption and sales. E.ON Energie Kundenservice wanted to get a lot more value out of the combined SAP BW by greatly increasing its performance, thereby making it practical to perform analysis at a very detailed, granular level rather than having to deal with averages. Accelerating performance would also free up time for parallel processing and ad hoc analysis. With these capabilities, E.ON Energie Kundenservice knew it could improve data accuracy and consistency, provide a better basis for decision making, and forecast demand and profitability by customer and by product. Faster performance would also allow the company to identify instances of overdue invoices and unbilled consumption by individual customer name. This in turn would provide data needed for period-end reporting and lead to faster collections, lower days sales outstanding, increased revenue, and better cash flow. Increasing performance would also permit the automation of many processes that had been manual, eliminating work-arounds required because of the time it took to process the firm s enormous data volumes. 3 / 6

4 SAP BW powered by SAP HANA delivers performance and economies E.ON Energie Kundenservice s IT services company, E.ON Business Services, led the project and began by considering several vendors. SAP was an obvious candidate because of the high performance delivered by SAP HANA and because SAP has positioned it as a platform for innovation. E.ON Energie Kundenservice made its decision after a proof of concept demonstrated the outstanding performance increases SAP HANA delivered in all relevant use cases. Another important factor in SAP s favor was the option it provided for cost-effective and flexible deployment in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. E.ON Energie Kundenservice and Business Services had very ambitious timelines: the new system had to be up and running in less than a year. With help from the SAP Active Global Support organization, E.ON Energie Kundenservice began with a readiness check of SAP BW powered by SAP HANA in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. They then merged the data warehouses and moved the consolidated system from the Oracle database to SAP HANA deployed in the cloud using the onboarding and migration service for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud that SAP offers. Next, they performed testing and development in the new setup before production data was loaded into the cloud. Finally, SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions were deployed as the front end. In parallel with merging the SAP BW applications, the System Landscape Optimization group from SAP merged the two instances of the SAP for Utilities solutions and SAP CRM. The E.ON Energie Kundenservice and SAP team went live with the new solution after just eight months, easily meeting schedule and budget, and cut over to the new solution with just three days of downtime. SAP BW is now delivered as a service using a 4 TB scale-out appliance for SAP HANA with an option to increase capacity as needed. 4 / 6

5 Pinpointing millions in overdue invoices Through the technical migration of SAP BW to SAP HANA alone, E.ON Energie Kundenservice has experienced major performance improvements. Jobs that needed hours or days to run can now be done in five minutes. This enables a more agile, interactive reporting approach and a more precise definition of reports. With SAP BW on SAP HANA, E.ON Energie Kundenservice can directly look at detailed data to identify outstanding accounts by specific customer name and then base its analysis on these findings. For example, it can selectively report on the 5% of customers with the largest discrepancies between billings and payments received. Previously, E.ON Energie Kundenservice could only look at average values, which meant it had to hypothesize where discrepancies might be found and then design reports based on these hypotheses, which took a long time to execute. Instead, the company now knows exactly where to look to collect several million incremental euros annually boosting revenue and aiding cash flow. SAP BW on SAP HANA is also making it easier for E.ON Energie Kundenservice to detect instances where it has not yet billed customers for energy consumed, which the company is required to include in its period-end close reports. In sales, E.ON Energie Kundenservice can more precisely forecast revenue and consumption figures, compare forecasts with actual numbers, and check the consistency between sales, billing, and consumption figures. Since SAP HANA enables insights into profitability by customer, E.ON Energie Kundenservice can now also design more effective and profitable sales, product, and service offerings. 5 minutes To run jobs that took hours or days 5 / 6

6 E.ON Energie Kundenservice Gaining ever-deeper insights through analysis E.ON Energie Kundenservice is just in the early stages of taking advantage of SAP HANA to renovate the way it does business. Now that it is practical to perform analysis and do reporting using individual account data, the firm will take the next step by preparing monthly consumption forecasts for its customers on an individual basis. It will also create new data models and use them to generate insights in unheard-of levels of detail. The company has many opportunities to save costs and improve efficiency, including further reducing data redundancies and aggregates, optimizing data storage, and constraining data growth. It has additional reporting systems in line for migration to SAP HANA as well. The migration to SAP HANA and deployment of SAP BW in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud was a costefficient way to make our business intelligence landscape future proof, says Rainer Saller from E.ON Energie Kundenservice. Studio SAP (16/01) 6 / 6

7 No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or for any purpose without the express permission of SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. Please see for additional trademark information and notices. Some software products marketed by SAP SE and its distributors contain proprietary software components of other software vendors. National product specifications may vary. These materials are provided by SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and SAP SE or its affiliated companies shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to the materials. The only warranties for SAP SE or SAP affiliate company products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. In particular, SAP SE or its affiliated companies have no obligation to pursue any course of business outlined in this document or any related presentation, or to develop or release any functionality mentioned therein. This document, or any related presentation, and SAP SE s or its affiliated companies strategy and possible future developments, products, and/or platform directions and functionality are all subject to change and may be changed by SAP SE or its affiliated companies at any time for any reason without notice. The information in this document is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates, and they should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.