By Freya Purnell
New Zealand retailer Briscoe Group has given its SAP Business Warehouse reporting a boost with a successful implementation of the SAP HANA platform.
With 80 Briscoes Homeware, Rebel Sports and Living & Giving retail outlets around New Zealand, Briscoe Group captures thousands of individual transactions every day.
Jeffrey Westcott, IT manager at Briscoe Group, said the group values its data, but delays in report delivery were discouraging for users.
“We load large volumes of data into our data warehouse on a daily basis that is used support merchandising, marketing and financial decision-making. On the Monday after going live, the majority of our reports ran significantly faster. Our experience is that people don’t like to wait. The upgrade to SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA was a performance step change and has taken us a step closer to real-time analytics.
REALTECH, which has previous experience in implementing SAP HANA for several NZ enterprises, provided implementation services on the project.
“There are a lot of inter-related variables that have to be accounted for when migrating to SAP HANA,” said REALTECH managing director Andrew Spicer. “We have developed a methodology that helps us specify the individual steps that need to be completed, required resources (including additional expert resources from our partner Sentio), estimated person-hours and anticipated benefits. As a result, we can provide firm ‘go-live’ dates and accurate cost estimates at the outset.”
Westcott said the faster processing of data will enable its use to support decision-making across all the group’s brands.
