A popular shoe manufacturer, the client matches every pair purchased with a new pair for a child in need. One for One. What began as a simple idea has evolved into a powerful business model that helps address need, advance health, education, and economic opportunity for children and their communities around the world. BW query providers were converted to HANA views and an access model for Tableau was set up, enabling dynamic and quickly customizable BI dashboards.

Key Challenges

The CFO desired a self-sufficient department that would be able to build and publish interactive dashboards to be used by the finance business partners and the executive leadership team. These dashboards present company data for sales, inventory, purchasing, logistics, and financials. For the finance team to get data into their dashboard tool, Tableau, the data needed to be exported to flat-files. This caused huge limitations when changes such as new data fields were required for the dashboard, and needed the BI team in IT to enhance the rickety flat-file ETL process for every small change. This resulted in excessive work for both teams in order to produce the requested dashboards and would take weeks to turn around for the finance team.

Solution

Planet Technology converted the major BW query providers into HANA views and set up an access model for Tableau. This allowed Tableau to read the business data from the company data warehouse directly.

Results

• Dashboards in a Flash: The Finance team can produce the dashboards they need within minutes instead of weeks.
• Data Support for Decision Making: Faster access to trusted data, enabling the CFO’s team to support insights for better business decisions.
• Increased Finance & BI Efficiency: 12.5% increase in efficiency for both the Finance and BI teams.
• Resources Freed for Value Add Initiatives: Savings reallocated to value add initiatives instead of maintenance and support.

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