By Gunnar Steindorsson

Success Story – global manufacturer with multiple lines of business and dozens of facility locations .

With Allevo, they reduced their planning cycle time by 60-65% by eliminating steps that were not adding value. Time previously spent on tedious data extraction, transformation, loading and reconciliation was now available for more value-add analysis and optimization efforts.

Moreover, better data quality and timeliness has improved reporting, allowing for better analysis and insight, which ultimately boosts overall business performance. By managing what matters, the result is measurable and valid to your business.

Success Story Food & Beverage Conglomerate –

The results achieved covered both a cycle time reduction of over 50% as well as significant improvement to data and process quality. As a result, this customer was able to move from annual to quarterly – and in some areas monthly – planning, since Allevo’s real-time bi-directional integration with SAP eliminated the lengthy and cumbersome ETL process.

This real-time integration also allows planners to see how certain changes affect the results in financial statements, something that was impossible before. Planners now have the ability to create multiple budgets quickly and can model scenarios with different underlying assumptions.

Finally, Allevo was able to provide the flexible reporting needed to cover the needs of all eight business units as well as satisfy some pretty tricky legal and regulatory requirements.

The Reporting , Analytics, and Planning Edge

Over 64,000 companies rely on SAP to manage their business operations, making it the most widely used ERP platform in the world. If you work in finance for one of these companies, you know how powerful and effective SAP is. If your role includes budget planning and forecasting, you can also attest to how difficult and painful this process can be in SAP. A transactional system, SAP can make it difficult to aggregate and consolidate data, create projections, and deliver views able to provide the insight needed for effective analysis and decision-making. Moreover, the system can be very inflexible and its user interface far from intuitive.

This is where Allevo comes in. Allevo takes the tedium out of complex budgeting, reporting and analytics processes, allowing professionals to work within their familiar planning environment – such as Excel worksheet – while providing real-time access to all business data within SAP. An enterprise-level budget planning, forecasting, and reporting solution, Allevo integrates directly with SAP to provide planners with easy access to all data needed for effective planning and controlling.

Far more than just a data integration tool, however, Allevo also provides well-structured processes and workflows so users can keep track of budgeting processes and efficiently map even complex budgeting structures. Thanks to the optimization Allevo provides:

• decision makers are better informed,
• the workload of the planning team is greatly reduced, and
• the overall data and analysis quality vastly improves.

Risk-Free Trial

Confident in our technology and value proposition, Allevo offers prospective clients not only customized demos but also a one-day workshop and 60-day trial of their solution free of charge. This makes the decision for Allevo virtually risk-free since clients can test the software in their own environment, using their own data, processes, and planning worksheets to ensure it meets their needs before they commit to a purchase.

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AmickBrown.com

The Closed Loop portfolio in Analytics

Authored by Iver van de Zand, SAP

We talked about the overwhelming power of analytics in Retail and B2C market-segments earlier and one of the topics discussed there, was the integration of operational business activities with operational analytics. In the example we saw the stock manager using analytics to change his stock-buying-behavior. He adjusted his order system by choosing another vendor and placing the order. Immediately his analytics are updated and he now requires to adjust his rolling planning or run a predictive simulation how the price-adjustment of his new stock might affect buying behavior of his customers. He might even want to adjust the governance rules with his new supplier or run a risk-assessment.

Below pictures visualizes the continuous integration of core business activities with business analytics, indicating examples of core processes with their accompanying analytical perspectives. These are just examples and not exhaustive at all.

Performance Management closed loop

Basically what the stock manager in our example needs, is a full – real-time – integration of business analytics with his core business activities over all aspects of his performance management domain. A predictive simulation of changing buying behavior lead to new analytical insights on product mix which might influence the companies’ budget and causes a risk analysis for new vendors.

To do so, a closed loop is required of following core components driven by the continuous flow of Discover – Plan – Inform – Anticipate:

• online Analytics on big data with interactive user involvement
• ability to adjust and monitor a rolling Planning for budgets, forecasts. A planning that that allows for delegation and distribution from the corporate level into lower levels
• GRC software to perform risk analyses on for example vendors or suppliers
• online Predictive analyses components to apply predictive models like decision trees, forecasting models or other R algorithms. Predictive analyses allow to look for patterns in the data that “regular” analytics is not able to discover. The scope of predictive analytics is gigantic: think not only sentiment analyses for social media, but also basket analyses in retail markets, attrition rates in HR and many, many more.

This so-called closed loop of predictive analytics, planning and performance management, business analytics and GRC is NOT a sequential process at all. They interact randomly towards each other in real-time and at any moment needed. They are also dependent towards each other, since Digital Transformation requires us to be so agile, we have to constantly execute and collaborate on the interoperability of the components and monitor the outcome. Lastly, the closed loop platform interacts on core operational activities (real-time insights in operational data) and as such the analytics are defined as Operational Analytics.

Closed loop platforms more than anything else require business users to drive its content and purpose. They drive the agility to the platform that is so heavily needed in the Digital Transformation era. On the other hand, the technical-driven architects do make a difference too since closed loop platforms are very sensitive to respect governance principles. A special role is allocated to the CFO or Office of Finance here; they will drive the bigger part of the Planning and Budgeting cycle.

One can imagine the calculation processes behind the closed-loop platform are huge and therefore a business case for an in-memory system is a sine qua non.

Imagine the possibilities

Needless to say that the closed loop model applies to all industries and not only in the retail example that I used here. I can list plenty of examples here but just to name a few:

• HR: attrition rates of employees
• Banking & Insurance: customer segmentation, product basket analyses
• Telco & Communications: churn and market segmentation nut also network utilization
• Public Government: Fraud detection and Risk-Mitigation
• Hospital: personalized healthcare

Apart from imagining the possibilities per market segment, we can also change perspectives and look at the possibilities per role within companies applying the closed-loop platform. Below picture provides capabilities the closed loop components could offer to various user communities. The potential is huge and extremely powerful when used in an integrated platform. This is also the weaker point of the closed loop platform: the components must be integrated not to miss their leveraging effect on each other.

A solution is available today

With its Cloud for Analytics offering, SAP is today the only provider with an integrated offering for the closed-loop platform. Even more: SAP Cloud for Analytics is integrated in one tool offering analytics, planning, GRC and predictive capabilities. One tool?? …. Yes, one tool is completely Cloud-driven and utilizes the in-memory HANA Cloud Platform it is running on. One tool that seamlessly lets analytics and planning interact with each other. A tool where you can run your predictive models and analyses and visualize the outcome with the analytics section. A tool that allows access to both your on premise data, your Cloud data and/or Hadoop stored data. And lastly a tool with fully embedded collaboration techniques to share your insights with colleagues but also involve them with planning or others. Our dream becomes reality.