By deploying SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, Porsche launched a data strategy matching the performance of their vehicles. The legendary sports car manufacturer successfully restructured their data landscape to automate processes, break down silos, and gain deeper insights from data.
For more than 70 years, Porsche has been guided by the principle of always getting the most out of everything – every concept, every component and every vehicle. They strive to turn performance into success in “the most intelligent way possible.” That drive for innovation can be seen in Porsche’s high-performance vehicles sold throughout the world.
Data is an essential part of Porsche’s mission of intelligent innovation. To get the most out of their data, Porsche successfully modernized their entire data landscape with SAP. First, they deployed SAP Analytics Cloud to completely streamline sales data for their global network of dealerships. Now, they brought data-driven capabilities beyond the sales dealerships and to the rest of the organization. This was achieved by deploying SAP Data Warehouse Cloud as the heart of their new organization-wide data architecture. All of this was accomplished cost-effectively without burdensome investments.
Data is at the center of everything we do at Porsche. That’s why we used SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud to improve efficiency, performance, and intelligence. Together, these two solutions helped us transform our data capabilities throughout the company.
Markus Hartmann, IT Project Management Lead at Porsche
What happened in Porsche’s sales department highlighted the potential of a new data strategy. Porsche operates a global network of 600-plus dealerships that power nearly 300,000 annual vehicle deliveries per year. However, getting the right sales data was once a time-consuming process.
This process relied heavily on extracting data from multiple sources and then inserting the data into spreadsheets to look for insights. This manual process meant that preparing for sales meetings could take days and slow down the closing of deals.
Porsche simplified this entire process with SAP Analytics Cloud. By setting up a visual dashboard, SAP Analytics Cloud instantly showed sales data, lead information, and what’s in the pipeline on a granular level. Individual dealerships could quickly pull and understand the data that’s relevant to them, while sales leaders got a broader view of the sales trends. All this cut the prep time for sales meetings from days to mere hours.
These dashboards also made an impact on day-to-day operations. Now, sales members can check dashboards first thing in the morning to get a real-time overview of what needs to be accomplished. With the success of this project, SAP Analytics Cloud is now used across the organization with 3,000 users in departments ranging from customer relations to controlling to human resources.
Porsche sought to bring digital transformation to more of its employees. For that to happen, they knew they had to restructure their data landscape to eliminate redundancy, break down silos, and automate processes. Once that happened, all lines of business could save time and draw valuable insights to help shape their decision-making.
Porsche already had several systems in place, including both SAP systems (such as SAP BW/4HANA and SAP ERP) and non-SAP systems (Microsoft SQL Server, CSV/XLSX flat files, and others). With all these systems in place, they didn’t want to add more to the mix. Instead, what they needed was a single virtual layer to connect all these systems and optimize the flow of data. Additionally, all of this would need to happen in a governed environment to prevent any errors.
Extending SAP BW/4HANA to the cloud with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud accomplished all this and more for Porsche.
We needed a solution that would bring together all our existing systems and ensure that the right end-users could easily access the data they needed. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud was the perfect solution to transform our data architecture without a heavy investment.
Markus Hartmann, IT Project Management Lead at Porsche
Porsche needed a uniform, governed environment. In the past, different lines of business and regions had their own data solutions, and it was often the case IT would be left in the dark as data was offloaded and uploaded by individuals. This led to a loss of governance in reporting.
Now, a new hybrid data warehouse empowers Porsche’s employees to connect and model data in a safe and governed environment. Started with the sales department, Porsche’s administrators gave access to the Spaces feature. Now, these users in sales could access relevant data in exactly such an environment. Here, users can experiment with the data through virtualization and share models across Spaces. All this happens with IT knowing that the original data is safe and secure.
Now, sales members get easier access to the data they need, allowing for much deeper insights than ever before. Porsche plans to roll out SAP Data Warehouse’s Cloud self-service capabilities beyond the sales department to provide rich insights to different lines of business. This is an open platform that easily connects with SAP Analytics Cloud, so users at Porsche can quickly start making the most of the data. This revamped data architecture, with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud at the center, helps Porsche continue turning performance into success.
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud are key tools helping our digital transformation strategy. Together, these two solutions work perfectly to help all stakeholders at Porsche get value from our data.
Markus Hartmann, IT Project Management Lead at Porsche
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