‘India is one of the countries where HANA adoption has been the fastest’

HANA is available in 2 formats-for organizations which do not have any SAP footprint and want to deploy HANA for analytics and secondly, organizations which use business suite comprising ERP, CRM, supply chain, etc.

These are business suite solutions now being certified on HANA. Enterprises who are using some of these applications can also be using HANA as a real-time database for SAP business application.

Dataquest queried Rajamani Srinivasan, vice president, applications sales, SAP Indian Sub-continent on how the enterprises have responded to HANA. Excerpts

value add for its business. It primarily wanted to run real-time material resource planning (MRP) using SAP ERP. That is why the company decided to move to SAP HANA and this gives a lot of business value in terms of being real-time on its inventory and material planning.

What business value does HANA offer to the customers? Please give some examples to illustrate...

When people move to HANA, from a value stand point, there are 3 things that we want to give: being smarter, being faster, and being simpler. Normally when we talk of big data implementation, how fast data can be crunched in milliseconds, etc. Being smarter means organizations can innovate, with focus on unsolvable business problems. They can initiate new processes, channels, and solutions that never existed. For instance, in machine readable data that exists, equipment generates a lot of information. We can integrate this with lot of other multiple sources of data that can come in; we can integrate with social media. Lot of this data which lies inside and outside organizations today, can be crunched and you can form new processes.

A machinery manufacturing company wants to understand prowess of real-time service to organizations; what it can do is, through the cloud, whatever data it receives from the customer's side, it can predict and give a service to the customer saying, "This spare part needs to be replaced", etc and provide a proactive service to the customer. Utility companies can do smart metering which is an initiative adopted by them across India, even in Karnataka there is a pilot of smart metering that is happening.

Being faster means you can have real-time insights-the transactional and analytics in one system. Earlier, all ERP used to have a world DB system, data warehouse for analytics, etc. Through HANA, it is one single database, where we have fused the analytical and the old transactional database into one database which offers information in real-time. MRP, CPG companies can run real-time promotion planning, they can react to a competitor's action on a real-time basis.

Being simpler is about simplifying the architecture through HANA-one single database. We also offer simple query user interfaces-interactive in nature. We also offer predictive analytics, mobile offering-imagine a sales person at a customer site wants to query about something, through a mobile handset he gets a 360 degree view; he can always get the information. The whole thing is delivered in a simple way.

What is the benefit in terms of cost?

For a new customer who buys SAP HANA database, the pricing is exactly the same as someone wants to buy SAP ERP, or say an Oracle database. It doesn't cost anything different, it is exactly the same.

 

For customers who have already bought SAP ERP, who have been running on other database and want to move to HANA, there is a different pricing mechanism. We knock off the price they have already paid towards the whole database and the differential price is what they pay to SAP. For customers who have to move to HANA, whether they deploy it for analytics, or enterprise applications, there is a very clear business case that requires to be built.

Can you specify the areas and avenues where the improvement comes in?

Absolutely. There are different situations, depending upon the usage. For example, someone who runs material resource planning (MRP), if he runs on SAP ERP-the benefits will be mentioned to the customer depending on the MRP runs, usage, etc.

If someone runs it for a process like finance-it will have accounting and finance close, how quickly the finance gets closed and how efficiently the receivable management can be managed. We have observed that in many organizations there is a time lag in terms of getting a real-time view. While having a real-time view, on the basis of our experience what sort of receivables can they cut (benefits). Also, what sort of relevance an organization has depending on its focus for receivables.

Then, it can also look at treasury management, it can look at payables, it can look at analyzing its profitability. There are multiple things it can look at when an organization is into finances.

For example, how a manufacturing company through material planning can reduce stockouts; how can it predict/demand, how it can reduce inventory and safety stocks, etc. There are these parameters that we offer and are tailor made for every organization depending upon its usage of SAP and then give it a cost-benefit analysis. That gives a lot of clarity to the customers so that they can understand what and how they will benefit by adopting HANA.