Having established the business case for HANA in the first two webinars of the series, the third explores which platform best suits an organisation’s needs for running a HANA based application. This webinar (see below) discusses the business drivers that will lead to choosing HANA, the IT drivers that may influence a HANA deployment and the SAP products that might be considered for HANA.
Business Drivers
The webinar begins by looking at how to improve online analytics, something that is vital to consider when implementing a HANA system. It discusses the ways in which to improve operational reporting, period close times, financing and forecasting. Following this, the webinar takes you through the benefits of streamlining business processes. It compares the user experience of SAP Fiori UX and SAP GUI, demonstrating that Fiori UX has fewer steps and screen changes, resulting in fewer interruptions and mistakes. This ultimately gives the back end of SAP the speed it needs to be competitive.
Another business driver of HANA is simplification. The webinar explores how HANA reduces inventory leading to less fragmentation of data, making it easier for those processing the data to understand it. This reduces storage size whilst also reducing the number of copies of data, creating a single version of the truth. The webinar provides examples of how HANA has helped customers simplify their systems.
Closing off the business drivers section, the webinar discusses digital transformation as a business driver of HANA. It looks at how Uber used software to revolutionise its industry and shows that, with SAP, this is possible in almost any industry. It also provides the example of Click and Collect to show the importance of gleaning real-time information as we approach the end of the year shopping season.
IT Drivers
In an ideal world businesses are forward-thinking and IT savvy, in some instances they are not. The webinar, therefore, looks at some of the IT drivers that might trigger a need to move to HANA. These include end of life triggers such as hardware refreshes, software licence renewals, data centre changes, and large strategic changes. It also explains that one of the largest IT drivers of HANA is the looming deadline of 2025, when nearly all SAP products will require HANA to operate.
Additionally, there may be some operational triggers which demand a move to HANA, for example, support limitation, data management challenges and the need for speed and mobility. This webinar discusses these triggers and provides examples of them.
SAP Products to Consider
There are multiple products to consider for a HANA implementation. The webinar presents some of the most used products as ideas to kick-start a HANA project. These include Sidecar implementations, database only migration, Extended Warehouse Management (EWM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and more. It provides, in detail, the benefits and drawbacks of each product to help you narrow down your options.
As you may have gathered from this section, the number of products can be overwhelming. Centiq is on hand to help. It can use its expertise in all of the products discussed to match your needs against the SAP suite.
This will, ultimately, help you build a business case for HANA.