Friday, April 26, 2024

Customer Success – APOS Publisher for Cloud – Report Broadcasting in Retail

Customer Profile

A division of a major African retail and wholesale group has hundreds of stores in multiple countries, and is a leader in the general merchandise, liquor, home improvement and wholesale food markets. Their business model focuses on high volume, low cost, responsible business and operational excellence.

Landscape & Core Challenge

The customer recently underwent a transformation in its information technology, replacing their legacy ERP system with SAP S/4HANA and their data warehouse with SAP BW/4HANA. They implemented SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) as their visualization and reporting solution with a live connection to SAP BW/4HANA for approximately 1,000 users. Their challenge was to communicate timely information using SAC visualizations and reports to their network of store managers and executives for better, data-driven management. They found that the Publications capabilities of SAC made report broadcasting complex and time consuming.

Problem: SAP Analytics Cloud Publications functionality did not meet their report distribution needs

Requirements

• Schedule and automate timely, personalized broadcasts
• Eliminate manual processes
• Send daily sales and stock dashboards in PDF format
• Send grid format reports in Excel
• Consolidate reports in broadcasts
• Automate certain reports based on conditions

Barriers

SAP Analytics Cloud Publications restrictions:

• Personalization using bookmarks is time consuming
• Timely delivery of reports is uncertain due to low priority of Publications within SAC processes
• No support for Microsoft Excel
• No support for report consolidation
• No support for conditional broadcasting

Outcomes & Customer Success

Implementing APOS Publisher for Cloud, this customer was able to:

• Automate timely broadcasting of reports to executive management in PDF format
• Send reports in formatted Excel
• Consolidate reports into a single email
• Configure conditional broadcasting to select individuals based on predefined thresholds

“APOS Publisher for Cloud complemented this customer’s newly established SAP Analytics Cloud capabilities, providing flexible, automated broadcasting of insights to executives, store managers and other stakeholders. The highly scalable nature of Publisher for Cloud gives them confidence that they can successfully expand SAC use to other divisions of the company.”
Cathy Ramsli, Account Manager, APOS