BI beginnings at HHML

The BI platform enables HHML management to make informed business decisions. By Rajendra Chaudhary

Vijay Sethi VP-IS & CIO, HHML "BI has enabled HHML to gather, store, analyze and provide access to data to help decision makers make better decisions."

It was 2008 and Hero Honda Motors Limited (HHML) had been running the SAP ERP for almost eight years. A marquee IT initiative for the famed two-wheeler company, the ERP had led to massive operational improvements in the said time. However, as beneficial as the ERP was to HHML, the reporting systems that were in place for module such as MM, QM,SD, PP and FI were fairly operational in nature, and didn't offer KPI based reporting capabilities. Plus there was a lot of information which lay outside the ERP, scattered in other systems such as the SAP CRM, SAP SRM, and HHML's Dealer Portal. While all these systems did offer some rudimentary reporting capabilities, there was no single, consolidated view of all this data for the users.

There was a gaping hole in the reporting mechanism. There were no dashboards, no exception based reporting or what if analysis that could be done. Vijay Sethi, Vice President-IS and CIO, HHML knew the importance of a uniform reporting mechanism across the enterprise.

"If only we could somehow collate all the data representing the company’s operations and present it in the form of easy to read dashboards to the top management, not only would it lead to greater insights into the operations and business for them but also enable faster and more accurate decision making,” said Sethi.

Sethi found the answer to his question in a business intelligence (BI) deployment. When it came to the solution, making a choice wasn't difficult for Sethi, and he chose SAP BI 7.0 since his existing landscape comprised mainly of SAP applications. His next task was choosing an implementation partner. Sethi decided to go with Bangalore based Enteg for implementation as the company had already done successful implementations of dashboards using SAP BW and Enterprise Portal technologies.

When implementation began, Sethi wanted to take it one step at a time. He began by building around ten dashboards for the top management. These dashboards presented them with a variety of reports in areas such as Sales performance, Inventory, Accounts Receivables and Marketing etc. Once the top management started viewing the dashboards, it immediately realized the ease with which it could get an organization wide view of operations and business performance. The word got around, and soon enough even the middle management began asking for similar dashboards to view the various reports on daily basis. According to Sethi, some of the management folks even wanted the ability to perform analytics. Of course, Sethi obliged.

In addition to the dashboards, a large number of queries across different modules such as Sales & Distribution (SD), Materials Management (MM), Production Planning (PP) and Financial Accounting and Controlling (FI/CO) were also deployed. Since HHML was deploying BI 7.0, queries had to be migrated from BI 3.0 to BI 7.0 and its reconciliation had to be done with the source system. Here, the implementation team faced considerable challenges in terms of loading the data which had been discontinued in the old BW system. This particular issue was addressed by using Process Chains.

The entire exercise took HHML six months to complete.

The implementation has enabled HHML to use to the BI platform to gather, store, analyze and provide access to data to help decision makers make better decisions. The presentation of KPIs on a daily basis has enhanced the visibility across the organization to the management. Reconciliation with the source system has ensured the reliability of KPIs presented in the dashboards. Today, management can rely completely on the dashboards without the need for other reporting tools.

From a technical standpoint, the automation of data load has ensured that there is no need for any manual process to have the data loaded for reporting purposes.

The platform has also enabled managers to monitor the market and align HHML's business strategies and competencies. Business exception has allowed managers to focus on things that aren't going as per the plan since they have access to in-depth analytics.

rajendra.c@expressindia.com