SAP Business Intelligence Solution Architect / Team Lead Core Program

Yamaha Motor Europe is going through a Digital Transformation program as part of a corporate initiative. Within that process, which encompasses the migration of the current ERP Solution towards SAP S/4 HANA, I contributed to defining the target solution for the transition to new Analytic, Finance Consolidation and Planning solutions. My contributions included:

• Supporting the Finance workstream with tool evaluation (SAP S/4 Group Reporting, One Stream, CCH Tagetik).
• Supporting the Analytics workstream on the new Analytic platform by providing strategy, roadmap, architecture, required infrastructure, and a detailed implementation project plan.
• Onboarding the offshore team located in India and making them main partners for the deployment (DevOps) for the Analytics workstream.

Project at ThyssenKrupp – Automotive, Plant Engineering, Steel production, Elevator, Construction. For the Industrial Solutions Business Unit at ThyssenKrupp, this involved an SAP BW greenfield implementation with the following responsibilities:

• Onboarded/offloaded resources based on development requirements within the project scope.
• Defined architecture and roadmap for the Analytic solution (BW on HANA, Business Objects 4.x and Analysis for Office).
• Built solutions to support operational and analytics reporting for Portfolio and Project Management (PPM), Procurement, Logistics and Finance, following SAP LSA++ architecture and leveraging Business Content.

Responsible for all aspects of the Business Intelligence solution in Europe, including Finance Consolidation and Sales Planning. To support business grow goals (double revenue in 5 years), achievements included:

• Finance area: reduced by 80 % the time required for the Financial Month End Close in Europe by implementing standard tooling, processes and architecture (SAP SEM-BCS); setting the foundation for the corporate Finance Consolidation project.
• Web channel business (B2C): increased the capability for launching new campaigns and doing follow up activities by using in-memory technology for data selections to support the CRM Segmentation processes (99 % time response improvement in segmentation processes based on data selected from the Data Warehouse); Implement analytical capabilities for Product Life Cycle Management and Marketing Permissions; Redesign of the CRM analytics for Campaign Management, Sales and Marketing Activities as a consequence of adding and improving processes, adding new sources of data and fulfilling legal requirements around customer data protection and latest EU Data Protection Regulations across Europe.
• Retail Business (B2C): implementation of analytical solution with daily sales targets derived from the Financial Budget to allow data driven business decisions to follow up the channel on daily and weekly basis, serving also as a data foundation for short (promotions and campaigns), mid (headcount, shifts) and long-term (opening of new stores) business decisions; providing full alignment of detailed retail data with P&L results and business and corporate goals.
• Dealer Business (B2B): supported the deployment of the Dealer Portal across the European dealer network by implementing analytics and metrics to monitor the Dealer portal adoption and usage; Improvements on the automated Sales reporting solution based on business feedback; Solution developed and implemented for capturing and analyzing Sell-Through data to enable new sales and stock insights, support better and quick commercial decisions, the follow up of launching new products to the market and facilitate stock optimization within the global and regional supply chain.
• Increase of the Business Intelligence footprint and adoption in Europe by 300 % (on active users) and 350 % (on passive users).
• Lead and coach a team of 7 FTEs (onshore and offshore FTEs) / Budget responsibility (Capex and Opex) > 1 million Euros.
• Implementation of SAP Layered Scalable Architecture framework (LSA).
• POC for SAP Businesses Object: SAP Dashboards, Web Intelligence, Explorer, Design Studio, Analysis for Office, SAP Lumira.
• European member of the team responsible for upgrading the Global SAP BW system to version 7.4 on HANA.
• European contributor and reference for the definition of a Data Framework and Architecture for BOSE Corporation.

To support the revenue and store growth, achievements included:

• Achieved 87 % improvement in time response for reports and analytics around Stock by redesigning of the Data warehouse stock model that included the deletion of 80 % of the data.
• The redesign resulted in an overall improvement of the goods reallocation process in the stores.
• The redesign led to better served sales and campaigns decisions.
• The redesign reduced the cross-store operations (cost savings).
• Facilitated the improvement of store traffic by developing a new analytical model that integrated new external CRM Loyalty Program and Marketing Campaigns data combined with Sales and Stock data.
• Implemented analytics on store visitors and Mystery shopper data to enable better monitoring and decisions on store execution level using standard retail KPIs.
• Defined the Strategy and Roadmap to implement Net weaver 2004s / BW 7.0 including the usage of SAP in-memory technology.
• Lead a team of 3 FTEs.

• Responsible of the SAP BI Global Template and architecture for the Building Efficiency business unit at Johnson Controls.
• Governance of the SAP BW Global Template and Regional Templates.
• Provided guidance, coaching and support for the regional BW teams located in America and Asia.
• Lead new developments, enhancements and roll out of the templates with other members of the SAP Global Architecture team (COE - Center of Excellence), regional BW teams, Business Process Owners and Key Users.
• Implement offshore model for BW requirements and support with third party vendor (Infosys - India).
• Support for SOX, external and internal audits requirements.
• Reduction of 70 % of time required for user Maintenance by implementing SAP VIRSA: new Role Security model (R3/BW/CRM) based on business roles.
• Defined the required steps and procedure for Disaster Recovery.
• Rolled out of the Global SAP BW Template and the Asian Regional SAP BW Template in Hong Kong.
• GAP analysis for the implementation of the Global SAP BW Template in Spain.

• Rolled out of the BW Global Template in Wuxi – China.
• Implementation of a reporting solution to support the global purchasing process (MM-PUR).
• Upgrade of the BW system and extraction component, migration from BEX Excel to BEX Web Front End.
• Improved the capabilities of the system to be available 24/7 all over the world by implementing new architecture for SAP BW, based on time zones. This new modeling concept was the predecessor of what is known today as Layer Scalable Architecture (LSA), best practice from SAP for Enterprise DW architecture.
• Roll out of the new SAP BW Global template and the American SAP BW Regional Template in US and Mexico, including the replacement of the Analytical solution Cognos with SAP BW and integration of Sales information from another local ERP system (Nextrend).
• Implementation of “Go to details” capability by using SAP Report to Report Interface (within the analytical system and to the transactional system) to help the business to gain trust and speed up the solution acceptance and signoff from the business.
• 90 % reduction on the support required for the interfaces to SAP BW by implementing SAP middleware (SAP-XI).

• HR Corporate Module: development and implementation of HR module (Genexus/Oracle database).
• Development and implementation of Sales module to support the export channel (AS/400 platform).
• Development and implementation of different Dashboards for the Board of Directors and Managers (Forest & Trees).
• Development and implementation of Account Receivables Dashboard (Forest & Trees).