Do business leaders really know what they can do with SAP HANA? Lee Dittmar, principal of Deloitte Consulting and global leader for SAP HANA and SAP Analytics, Deloitte Analytics, says not always – for some, not even after they have invested in the in-memory platform. Eleanor Reader reports.
One of the most common questions Lee Dittmar gets asked by first-time purchasers of SAP HANA is what they should do with it.
“If you say to a business leader right now, ‘you bought HANA, what would you like to do?’, the truth is some of them don’t know what to ask for because they don’t know the art of the possible,” he says.
Dittmar has spent the last 30 years helping organizations improve business performance and risk management by better aligning information management, technology and analytic capabilities with business needs.
Clients from every industry and sector Deloitte operates in have shown interest in HANA since its launch in 2010 – from longstanding SAP-centric industries like industrial product and manufacturing to consumer products, aerospace, defence, automotive, government, the public sector, education, financial services and banking.
To help clients conceptualise where HANA might be put to best use in their organisations, Deloitte has invested heavily in developing solutions and demo solutions that aim to solve real business problems.
“As opposed to saying ‘this is really cool technology, what can you do with it?’, we have been working through a series of known business problems that past clients haven’t been able to solve,” says Dittmar.
His team believe in taking a hands-on approach to HANA as opposed to learning from PowerPoint or marketing material.
“We’ve been combining our sector, domain and analytics expertise with my team that understands HANA and how to work with it, and coming up with as many practical applications as we can,” he says.
Why do business leaders care?
Dittmar steers away from rehashing HANA’s in-memory, cloud database and parallel processing capabilities when talking to clients.
“One of the things that I talk about with our customers is ‘why do business leaders care?’ and they care because I can rapidly bring data into HANA from multiple sources wherever that data is,” he says.
Being able to set it up quickly and show clients data in days rather than weeks is another differentiator that sets HANA apart from the rest, he adds.
“Some of the durations that we talk about from concept to finishing are measured in weeks,” he says. “Let’s be blunt, how many SAP products and projects do you talk about in weeks? It’s often months and unfortunately sometimes years.”
How to get the most out of HANA
If HANA is a 100 per cent IT-driven – for example, changing the architecture and not the inside of the company – you won’t get a lot of value from it, says Dittmar.
“Business leaders are hearing great things about HANA and they are knocking on CIOs’ doors and saying, ‘You’ve got to get me this. Can I get enterprise HANA put in, so I can do all these new things?’.”
What’s really important for success is to have business and IT collaborate, and for everyone involved to recognise that this is about the real-time revolution – it is a multi-year journey.
“Business executives want to understand what types of things they can do and how they can get value out of it, and the only way they are going to get real value out of it is not to look at just one-offs, but to have a programme and set up capabilities to allow them to have that robust journey,” Dittmar says.
In support of the SAP HANA platform, Deloitte has launched an Analytics Center of Excellence based in Hyderabad, India.
The Center is designed to provide Deloitte clients with the latest and most up-to-date strategies for supporting the deployment of HANA within their enterprise.
Dittmar advises his clients to set up their own Centre of Excellence within in their organisation to capture their successes and lessons, and to learn from the successes of others.
“You have to seed these lessons with ‘here is what we have done in another division or here is what another company has done’,” he says.
Keeping the business satisfied
A large part of Dittmar’s work with customers is about bridging the gap between the capabilities of IT and the expectations of business executives.
Many businesses often aren’t satisfied when an IT project is delivered. According to Dittmar, they always want more. “They want to change something, they want something else. Guess what? HANA gives the ability to do that,” he says.
Furthermore, HANA provides a transformational opportunity that makes organisations’ business processes data driven instead of rules-driven.
“We can give business leaders information at the time of the next transaction so they can make a better decision. We are not talking about setting a better strategy or a better plan or a better forecast, we are talking about those many decisions that collectively add up to how a business runs,” Dittmar says.
HANA can also be deployed when customers want to push enterprise analytics and data to mobile devices but don’t have the patience for latency.
“With HANA I can take out that latency, and if you are trying to deliver analytics on an iPad or an iPhone, people don’t want to wait,” he says.
HANA in practice
One use case in the supply chain area Dittmar is particularly excited about is the utilisation of predictive tools so clients know what components are causing the most variability in their production.
“That’s a significant problem. Now they can say, ‘I know which 20 of the 100,000 parts are affecting my manufacturing schedule and what I should do about it’.”
Deloitte customer T-Mobile’s first use case was around marketing campaign analytics – the ability to evaluate in real-time whether the program was having an effect and to drive it and readjust it.
Deloitte also has customers using HANA to give their call centres the ability to respond to a customer request in real-time, such as in the fleet management area.
“For example, a customer wants to know whether to replace or repair. In the past the call centre agent would have to run an analysis on the fleet or vehicle and wait to get back to them.
Now, they can push the button, run the analytics and say whether they should replace or repair right away,” he says.
An exploding footprint
Dittmar predicts that in the future we will be seeing more and more applications running on the in-memory database.
“It’s really key for every organisation to develop their own roadmap which works for them and not only bring in great technology, but make the process and people changes and the governance changes and the decision-making changes that ensure they will get great value out of that,” he says.
“Eventually, and it will take years, real-time will just become a matter of course. It’s not right now.”
Dittmar’s top HANA tips
Apply an agile methodology.
“Don’t think that you have to know everything you are going to use it for.”
Have a process that identifies potential use cases.
“Throw the net out wide, learn what others are doing and continue the journey.”
Pick something that you can’t do right now.
“From my experience, the best success in the organisation comes when you do something with HANA you couldn’t do before as opposed to try to make something a little better.”
Create buzz in the client organisation.
“Share your successes – ‘That process used to take 24 hours, I can now get the answers in four seconds’.
I want that to spread around the organization so people are scratching their heads and going, ‘You know what, I’ve got a problem like that too, I wonder if I can get my problem solved’.”
This article was originally published in Inside SAP Winter 2013.
