Infohub for the beverage industry

A central information environment for partners in the beverage industry with visual analysis in self-service. This is the goal of the beverage wholesale group Team Beverage with the provision of services around the business intelligence solutions SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom. SAP partner Itelligence designed this solution together with Team Beverage and then successfully implemented it.

"With the SAP Analytics Cloud analytics platform and the SAP Digital Boardroom solution, we are building external reporting for beverage wholesalers and beverage producers and coupling this with our internal reporting"

reports Uwe Albershardt, member of the Board of Management of Team Beverage.

The company sees itself as an alliance group and service platform for the German medium-sized beverage industry. In addition to distribution, purchasing, and marketing for beverage wholesalers, retailers, and the food service industry, the business areas also include networking with beverage manufacturers.

With a network of over 40,000 distribution points (convenience 11,000, catering 30,000, beverage retail 2000, wholesale 50), mandated system sales of around 1.3 billion euros, and a brokered returnable beverage volume of more than eleven million hectoliters, the company is a market-leading distribution, purchasing, marketing, and service platform for the beverage industry in Germany.

The partners of the trading platform benefit from the bundling of resources, know-how and last but not least from the purchasing volume and a multichannel distribution.

As a service, Team Beverage's new SAP-based solution provides an information hub as a single point-of-truth for market development, with which the medium-sized partners in the association group can gain new insights into sales figures and current market events in condensed form right down to the individual point of sale.

For this purpose, the sales data is harmonized in one, visualized via SAP Analytics Cloud as well as SAP Digital Boardroom and made available to the partners involved as a cloud service.

Real-time connection to SAP BW

Team Beverage was looking for a scalable cloud platform that had a real-time connection to SAP BW and integrated external data sources for the preparation and provision of market data for use in-house and by business partners.

In addition, a visualization environment was to be created that key users from the business departments could use in the context of self-service analytics.

The solution should benefit from short-term innovation cycles of a cloud solution without being technologically dependent on specific hardware, database or software requirements.

The core of the project is the functional and technical development of a cloud-based infohub for the beverage industry. Team Beverage provides this information platform as a service and acts as an "information broker".

The platform's partners subscribe to analyses and dashboards in a rental model and can thus scale their own investments themselves. This disruptively creates a completely new, digital business model in which the platform operator generates additional value via licensing and consulting.

The potential market ranges from beverage producers and beverage wholesalers and retailers to restaurants and convenience partners such as service station operators.

Flexible solution for heterogeneous sources

The combination of SAP Business Warehouse, SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom makes the connection and integration of very heterogeneous data sources as well as reporting much more flexible and powerful, as Gerhard Baier, Director Business Analytics and Information Management at SAP partner Itelligence, who is responsible for the project, reports:

"Only with SAP's new cloud-based business intelligence solutions is the technological basis in place to build a new business model for Team Beverage.

The new transparency created with Team Beverage's service offering and the opportunities for benchmarking in the beverage trade will make a significant contribution to the digitization of the finely structured beverage industry, which is dominated by medium-sized companies."

SAP Cloud Analytics

Until now, many players in the market have worked with isolated solutions that followed their own logic and interpretation. Thus, more or less integrated solutions with user interfaces were used, which often required deep (IT) expert knowledge.

As a result, the partners in the association group lacked a real-time overview as well as analysis options for increasing efficiency, for example, in sales and in the support of customers in retail and gastronomy. SAP Cloud Analytics now combines reporting, analysis, simulation and forecasting in one product.

Intuitive Analytics - SAP Digital Boardroom

Using the SAP Digital Boardroom solution, companies can also create intuitive analytics applications to meet their unique needs.

The analytics project at Team Beverage starts with sales and market analyses for beverage retailers in Team Beverage's affiliated group as well as beverage manufacturers.

Thanks to the holistic market view, the complete process chain is mapped - from ordering goods from the manufacturer to delivery to the B2B partner.

In further development phases of the solution, the participating partners in the beverage industry will be provided with additional information such as detailed cash register sales data as well as forecast data in order to optimize the design of merchandise assortments and logistics processes.

Likewise, additional Team Beverage service offerings are planned to provide partners with proprietary planning and forecasting capabilities to optimize profitability.

The information hub based on SAP Analytics Cloud about market events in the beverage industry is to become part of a 360-degree service around the business of Team Beverage's partners by integrating it into a customer journey, for example with an integration into Team Beverage's gastronomy portal Gastivo.

Whitepaper S/4 in the midmarket

Together with the Heinz Nixdorf Chair for IT-supported Logistics at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management (HHL), SAP partner Gisa has published a white paper on the current status of the conversion to S/4 Hana at medium-sized companies.

The starting point is the question of the companies' readiness to migrate to S/4 Hana and the associated questions such as time frame, planned budget and operating model. In fact, more than a third of the companies surveyed are already planning to introduce S/4 Hana by 2025. So the indecision is still being felt, especially in the midmarket.

Download at: www.gisa.de (registration required)