Sokołów SA is the first company in Central and Eastern Europe which has launched the SAP Business Suite applications on the SAP HANA platform. Thanks to migrating to the in-memory technology, the company has accelerated multiple times transactional and analytical processes as also optimized maintenance costs of the IT infrastructure.
Sokołów SA, the leader of the Polish food industry and a leading manufacturer of meat in Poland, is the first company in the Central and Eastern European region to have launched the SAP Business Suite software on the SAP HANA platform. Completion of the implementation in Sokołów SA was announced by the companies BCC, the main implementation partner of Sokołów and SAP Polska whose consultants supported the implementation.
The aim of the project of migration to SAP HANA in Sokołów SA was to simplify management, optimize the costs of the IT infrastructure maintenance and multiply acceleration of transactional and analytical data processing. Sokołów SA has achieved that through migrating SAP Business Suite applications and SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) to the SAP HANA platform. The extensive migration project covered the entire transactional and analytical processes supported by SAP applications as also the area of process integration in conjunction with the employee portal.
“The application of an innovative in-memory technology allows for a more efficient and a more convenient work with the SAP systems we have been using for years. It is a completely new quality in the use of business applications” – said Bogdan Biłas, IT Director at Sokołów SA. “Faster transaction processing, rapid access to data and shortening the system response time allows us not only to act more efficiently within the IT area but first of all to release resources to more effectively build the competitiveness of Sokołów SA on the Polish and European market”.
“We congratulate the company Sokołów SA on the choice of the latest SAP solutions and the success of the pioneering implementation of SAP Business Suite on the SAP HANA platform. This project sets new standards for use of the in-memory technology in our part of Europe” – said Kinga Piecuch, the President of SAP Polska. “I am convinced that SAP HANA will allow the company Sokołów to strengthen thei market position and to develop new, more efficient business processes”.
“Migration of SAP environments to the SAP HANA platform is one of the most innovative projects implemented by BCC in the recent years. The successful implementation in Sokołów confirms that with SAP HANA Polish companies can make a significant progress in the use of IT tools for business data planning and analysis” – as Andrzej Moskalik, Director for Client Services Department at BCC commented.
Sokołów SA is accelerating reporting and simplifies infrastructure
The SAP HANA platform may perform the function of both an analytical platform as also a database system using the in-memory technology for processing of gigantic volumes of data in real time. This is what is now happening at Sokołów SA. After migrating of SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) and SAP Business Suite to the SAP HANA platform the data loading and planning speed has increased tenfold and the speed of reporting from the SAP BW level increased more than a hundred times. Generating reports directly from SAP Business Suite, where the productivity has increased a thousandfold, is even faster.
Dramatic increase of the data warehouse and SAP HANA business applications efficiency has been accompanied by an equally significant simplification and reduction of the total costs of the IT infrastructure maintenance. The previous database could store about 2.5 TB and after migrating to SAP HANA it has been compressed to less than 600 GB. At the same time direct reporting from SAP HANA was introduced, which eliminated the need to create indexes to clustered tables. Ultimately, SAP HANA is to replace traditional databases used so far by Sokołów SA for SAP Business Suite.
Comfort and efficiency in SAP Business Suite and analytical applications
Greater simplicity and efficiency of SAP applications based on SAP HANA have resulted in a range of further benefits. Faster access to real data translates into bigger comfort and better quality of work of both business analysts and other employees who use SAP Business Suite applications in the management of, among others, finances, accounting, deliveries and customer service. They can also create business reports – including ad-hoc reports at any level of aggregation and without having to involve the IT department.
"Compared to the previous business model this is a qualitative change. IT specialists no longer need to optimize the productivity of transactional and analytical systems when there is a need to generate extensive and detailed reports” – adds Krzysztof Siwiec, Business Development Manager at BCC. „SAP technology, we applied at Sokołów, is simplified and more efficient. As a result, its employees can to a greater extent use the applications to employee self-service. Also administrative efforts to optimize reporting processes have been reduced.”
The employees of Sokołów SA can now, without any concerns about the loss of IT infrastructure performance, more effectively use SAP solutions such as SAP ERP or SAP Business Objects, carry out dozens of additional transactions, increase the number of analytical views and ably use the newly implemented tools: SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, SAP Accounting and SAP Cash Management. The applications powered by SAP HANA assist their users in the areas of planning and budgeting, financial and accounting data management and controlling and forecasting the cash flows in real time.
