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Success Story: HOCHLAND - Digital Transformation with SAP Advanced Analytics

ABOUT HOCHLAND 

Hochland Española, is one of the subsidiaries of the Hochland Group, a German company founded in 1927. With more than 5,000 employees, Hochland Group is one of the largest cheese producers in Europe, with a presence in Spain, Germany, France, Romania, Russia, Poland, while international subsidiaries include the United States and Australia. 

OBJECTIVES 

Hochland Spain was looking to initiate their Digital Transformation with a best-in-class Analytics solution to address near real-time advanced analytical capabilities to achieve the following strategic objectives:  

  • Provide high-end analytical capabilities for different departments (Supply Chain, Commercial, Finance, Procurement, IT and others) 

  • Ensure executive analytics with cross-organizational data can be used by the Executive Board for faster decision making 

  • Ensure scalability to extend to new business areas and new technologies (S/4HANA, geographical or predictive analysis) 

  • Become a reference for best-in-class Analytics for the entire Hochland Group 

APPROACH 

The Solution had to be developed for and adopted across all members of the company including Directors, Managers and team members. To achieve this, the project team involved many users from the beginning to unify criteria, consolidate requirements, align expectations, etc. to ultimately achieve buy-in from day 1. 

The scope of the project was divided into different stages: 

  • Installation and configuration of the architecture artefacts to create a scalable platform 

  • Analysis and design of the solution by organizing workshops with each department to align expectations 

  • Dashboard design to fulfill their analytical needs by creating a disruptive approach 

  • Development of a solid data model that includes transactional and master data features

  • Training the business users to use the tools autonomously

TECHNOLOGY 

The technology and solution decision was key as it had to provide Hochland the opportunity to implement a user friendly, customizable and completely cloud scalable and flexible insights platform:

Architecture Overview 

RESULTS 

  • Increased Customer Service Level: operational procedures were reformulated and improved 

  • Warehouse and Supply: business procedures improvement thanks to the near-real time analysis on how to reduce costs, times, etc 

  • Invoice Accuracy: quicker and more optimized monthly closures 

  • Procedures Optimization: better access to information is generating conversations between departments

  • Cross Company: more departments are being integrated within the solution (+ new sources: S4/HANA, BW, JIRA, Flat files…) 

  • Predictive analytics: to take advantage of this solution with new data-driven innovation 

  • Geographical capabilities: to identify hot and cold areas, trends of returns, etc

This advanced analytics project was awarded as a Top 5 Winner at SAP Quality Awards 2021 in the Digital Pioneer category.