Provimi Accelerates Decision Making with Innovative Business Analytics

The Situation

After significant corporate reorganizations, leading animal nutrition company Provimi integrated all of its 26 individual ERP platforms into one holding company. This resulted in an overwhelming amount of data that took five days to process at the month’s end. Provimi needed to understand the information in its database and how to capitalize on this data in order to have sustainable and profitable growth. Rogier Jacobs, CIO Provimi said, “We do a lot of trading so we purchase a lot of goods. There are massive price fluctuations in this market. We have in some cases, slim margins so we really needed to improve the way we approached our business, our whole information life cycle, our customers, our products, our portfolio.”

Looking for an efficient and effective way to improve its operational reporting, Provimi found a solution in SAP HANA accelerator for Cost and Profitability Analysis (CO-PA), delivered by Capgemini. Capgemini had been working for several years with Provimi on its ERP systems and projects. Adding that experience to its strong Businesss Intelligence (BI) knowledge, Capgemini was the perfect partner to collaborate with SAP and Provimi on this initiative.

The Solution

Capgemini’s team of applications services, outsourcing professionals, and Business Information Management (BIM) experts implemented SAP HANA, SAP Landscape Transformation, and BusinessObjects BI 4.0 in Provimi’s IT landscape. HANA is SAP’s new flexible, multipurpose, in-memory computing software. Provimi is the first successful implementation of SAP HANA in any organization in the Netherlands.

The Result

Provimi now has immediate access to ten million detailed records to view and analyze up-to-date and in-depth information on costs and profitability. The process of creating annual reports for all company codes, which previously
took approximately five working days, can now be achieved in two to three days. SAP had the technology that could
be rolled out rapidly and Capgemini was able to meet that speed. The end result is that Provimi has its data in real time that ‘can be analyzed at the speed of thought’. Now Provimi can run a report fast and dive deep into its data to obtain the level of detail required by the business for analytical purposes. Real-time insight into product margins, drilled down to the lowest level of data, gives Provimi an opportunity to optimize its sales operations. This initiative has considerably saved time, reduced costs and simplified the company’s technology landscape. Rogier Jacobs said, “The solution has
enabled us to be better prepared for structural, sustainable and steep growth. After having completed this global ERP
roll out and providing more relevant business information from the holding to individual companies and vice versa, we were indeed able to identify more effectively interesting customers, interesting customer segments and optimize less successful products and customer segments.”