Business management system based on Hana

Dozens of Dell sales teams use business intelligence technology in their daily work. This ranges from creating sales forecasts to identifying the areas that offer the best opportunities for growth.

The company's existing BI solution was not exactly known for its speed, and to generate analysis reports, sales colleagues had to submit a request to the IT department for each of these reports.

"It took far too long for the sales teams to get the information they needed from IT, and sometimes nothing came back at all"

explains Bart Crider, Director Enterprise Business Intelligence at Dell.

To avoid waiting too long for reports, employees often tried to extract data on their own.

"Some employees spent 80 percent of their time moving data back and forth and processing it"

says Crider.

As a result, the sales teams lacked consistent and precise evaluations and reports on the pipeline, forecasts, sales and margins.

IT and management initiative

Dell's IT department worked closely with management to jointly develop a more efficient BI solution. The aim was to design a strategy to develop a new generation of a more powerful reporting, analysis and data management solution.

In addition, a BI committee consisting of senior representatives from all business units and members of IT management was established under the leadership of management to steer Dell's BI investments, standardize corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs) and manage everything centrally.

In a final step, a new business management system (BMS) was developed. "For performance reasons, we wanted to use an in-memory solution," says Crider. In-memory database management systems use main memory for data storage instead of disk storage, as is usual with conventional systems.

"We had been looking at the Hana appliance for some time and realized that it would give us the performance and flexibility that the business expected from us. We therefore recommended building the new BMS on Hana." As a multi-purpose in-memory appliance, Hana connects the SAP software with PowerEdge servers from Dell.

Dell's IT department then worked closely with the Dell Hana Services team to build the new business management system on a Dell Hana solution based on five PowerEdge R920 servers with Intel Xeon processors, 512 gigabytes of RAM and a 1-terabyte hard disk.

The solution also includes Hana Studio on a Dell PowerEdge R620 server, which offers a whole range of tools for data modeling. A Dell Compellent SC8000, storage array and Dell Networking S4820T and S60 switches are also part of the solution.

Dell's IT department and the Hana Services team then installed and tested the Dell Engineered Solution for Hana and configured the Hana Studio.

A proof-of-concept installation was then set up with 50 internal users in the company, allowing them to easily access sales data and customer information, analyze data and create BI reports for their forecasting. The new BMS was then rolled out to 14,000 Dell employees.

"We planned and implemented the solution in just a few months"

as Doug Hillary, Vice President of Global Sales Operations at Dell, reports.

"Without the close cooperation between management and the IT department, this would have cost us several quarters, if not years"

explains Pilar Schenk, Executive Director of Global Sales Operations at Dell.

"It was our third attempt to introduce such a solution. This time we were successful because we were finally able to build on the right technology and a strong partnership."

Thanks to the close partnership between management and the IT department, Dell has successfully automated 90 percent of standardized sales reports and dashboards with the new BMS, allowing users self-service access to business-critical, sales and KPIs.

Analyses: 60 percent faster

Sales reps can now pull self-service analytics in minutes instead of weeks, and analytics reports are created 60 percent faster with Dell Hana.

"Thanks to Dell's Hana solution, our sales teams now have more time to focus on their customers and less time simply processing data. In other words, they can focus on selling instead of waiting for data queries."

The number of sales and management employees accessing source systems to create individual reports has also been reduced by 80 percent.

Sales employees can therefore use the Hana solution as a central source for KPIs and key figures in their day-to-day business and spend less time extracting data and creating reports.

Hana's in-memory capabilities provide users with more flexibility in terms of data modeling and allow them to quickly adapt to changing business decisions.

"Because all data is stored in memory, there is no longer any need for extensive data movement in the background to obtain detailed information"

says Crider.

"If you want to analyze the same data for a different question, you can do that very easily. What's more, as soon as you've finished creating the desired data records in Hana, you can immediately forward them to SAP BusinessObjects for reporting. This process is much more time-consuming in a traditional data warehouse system."

BI costs halved

To date, Dell has reduced BI costs by nearly 50 percent through the increased efficiency, centralization, automation and standardization achieved with Dell's Hana solution.

The company expects further cost savings through the use of the solution's compression functions.

"When we uploaded our historical sales data to the Hana solution at scale, we saw a 20-to-1 data compression rate, which exceeded our own expectations"

says Crider.

"This will help us maximize our investment as we can now process more data in Hana without having to buy additional hardware or licenses."

Agile methods

Dell's IT department worked closely with management and adopted an agile approach to the BMS project - from development to implementation.

Once the solution was in use, the team was able to implement changes more quickly. With a BI solution, it is particularly important to respond quickly to users' change requests.

"In a BI environment, users often don't really know what exactly they want from the system until they can actually see and use the data"

says Crider.

"Having the flexibility to respond to their requirements in an agile way once the solution is up and running helps to ensure that everything happens quickly and efficiently, allowing users to focus fully on data analysis."

Cooperation promotes innovation

The success of the new solution is based directly on cross-departmental collaboration between the management and IT teams. Right at the start of the project, a BI steering committee made up of managers from the business and IT departments ensured that the project got off the ground.

One of the committee's most important decisions was the creation of internal BI competence centers - so-called Centers of Excellence (COEs) - in which employees from the areas of sales, marketing, finance, operations and human resources were represented.

With the help of these competence centers, the committee was initially able to gather important input on what the BMS should look like. Based on these ideas, the model for the solution was developed - a hub-and-spoke model with central BI functions supported by business analysts.

Due to the successful introduction of the BMS and the knowledge gained from it, the committee is already planning to extend the solution to other areas of the company. For example, IT is currently working on providing account executives with mobile access to sales data.

Dell's IT department and management are also considering introducing "digital dashboards" and tools to give executives and sales managers quicker access to information and to look deeper into the BMS to examine and analyze areas that require more attention.

"We also look at where there may be shared data sets between different departments in finance or marketing so that the same data, insights and BI functions can be shared"

says Crider.

"We will definitely use the same architecture and extend the solution to other business units within Dell."