Medical and pharmaceutical provider steps away from a traditional, complex BI approach in SAP
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- Belgium
Product
- QlikView
Tech Stack
- SAP
- SQL Server
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Cost Savings
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
- Life Sciences
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Predictive Quality Analytics
Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
The B. Braun Group develops, distributes and sells high-end medical and pharmaceutical products and services for hospitals, nursing homes, pharmacies and home care organisations. The company is headquartered in the heart of Germany and has 39,500 employees worldwide. With annual revenue of almost 4 billion euro, B. Braun is one of the leading healthcare suppliers. The Belgian subsidiary in Diegem is responsible for the distribution within Belgium, delivering directly to hospitals, wholesale pharmaceutical suppliers and specialized medical suppliers. The B. Braun Group works with SAP modules worldwide including Materials Management (MM), Sales and Distribution (SD), Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling (CO).
The Challenge
The B. Braun Group, a leading healthcare supplier, was facing issues with reporting and analyzing data due to the slow speed of their SAP warehouse. Not every team member had access to the SAP warehouse, leading to a loss of time for managers who were busy putting together reports in Excel, instead of actually spending time analyzing the data. The building of reports to analyze a combination of both internal and external figures was a problem, resulting in incomplete reports that could not be analyzed properly. Reporting took too much time from both the business managers and the IT department. The reports were slow to access and not in all cases complete as the capabilities to combine external data were missing. This was affecting the competitive position of B.Braun in the Belgian market, since managers were not able to get immediate insight into their customers’ sales figures, the results of the different product ranges and the net profit margins.
The Solution
After a QlikView demonstration by Credon, B. Braun discovered the QlikView advantages. B. Braun was especially impressed with the way people without any IT knowledge can perform detailed data analyses independently and in an intuitive manner using drill downs. For the initial implementation B. Braun trained a team of 5 people. The training took place in May 2009 and after a couple of weeks the first application for sales analysis went live. B. Braun chose to centralize all data, both from SAP, the quotation application and external data sources, on a SQL server. Subsequently, QlikView was connected to the data in this SQL server. The sales application enables managers to report and analyse sales forecasts and to report and analyse profitability on different levels, such as product and customer level as well as sales forecasts.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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