Super SAP BI Journey

Date: 1 Mar 2010
Location:

Since 2003, the company has implemented a range of SAP tools and have remained committed to both SAP and Extend Technologies as their implementation partner th

As one of Australia and New Zealand's largest retailers with more than 300 stores, 5000 team members and annualised sales in excess of $800 million, ASX listed Super Cheap Auto Group Limited have increased their store network substantially since their initial SAP for Retail ERP implementation in 2003. As a successful multi brand company, the group currently comprises three businesses: Supercheap Auto, BCF (Boating Camping and Fishing), and
Goldcross Cycles under its retail banner.

Since 2003, the company has implemented a range of SAP tools and have remained committed to both SAP and Extend Technologies as their implementation partner throughout the journey. "You get the feeling with [Extend] that they're always looking for ways for us to improve. They know our business really well so they don't bring us product offerings for the sake of it, it's always targeted, [and is] something that will benefit us," says Super Cheap Auto Group Limited's CFO, Gary Carroll.

Extend Technologies' BI Line of Business Manager, David Simpson says the underlying factor throughout Super Cheap Auto Group's journey with SAP is that they are prepared to invest in implementing the right solution up front. "They ran a proper project to put this in and they will invest the money up front and put a proper solution in as opposed to putting a
range of point solutions. I think that has really enabled the growth that they've gone through."

SAP BW
By 2005, the retail group was looking to implement a BI solution for their expanding business. At this time the group consisted of two brands - the long established Supercheap Auto (SCA) brand, which had around 230 stores and revenue of $500 million, and the BCF brand which had only a handful of stores. "That was actually one of the reasons we wanted to move to a more efficient reporting solution," says Carroll. "We knew in 2005 that we'd be looking to grow the number of the brands under our management [so] we wanted to come up with a more efficient way of reporting against the performance of those brands, both from a process and a technology point of view."

Up until then, the business had been heavily reliant on Excel for its reporting which ultimately posed concerns in terms of people changing the look, format and content of reports. "It made it harder for us to roll out across the business and also didn't really enable us to use the power of SAP in any material way," says Carroll. To amend this, the company decided to
implement SAP's BW application which rolled out in early 2006. The initial focus was on management reporting and performance reporting for the senior leadership team as well as the merchandise teams for both brands, says Carroll, "because they're [both] very heavy reporting users."

The company also put in place reporting across point of sale, sales, inventory solution and financial reporting, says Simpson. He says some of the challenges and also the achievements during this period of the project were around the reporting which combines sales and inventory. "[It] has really helped them to drive efficiency in their supply chain and
efficiency for the stock levels that they hold."

Data Cleansing
Though the implementation plan was executed well and the company rolled out on schedule, the initial take up of the BW application and the performance of the system itself was a lot slower than anticipated, says Carroll. "What we discovered
when we were doing a lot of the post implementation analysis was one thing we (not Extend or SAP) had failed to do was to undertake a thorough data cleansing prior to rolling out the business warehouse application." Consequently, many redundant data items remained sitting in the warehouse and calculating key results, such as, out of stocks,
became time consuming. This time lag also "meant that people particularly in our merchandising team that were very good at operating SAP were reverting back to the old SAP way of doing things. So we weren't getting the take up that we really needed around BW, but that was our fault not so much the system's," says Carroll.

To improve the performance of the system, the company carried out master data cleansing over the course of the remainder of 2006. Simpson, says they had to put a lot of effort into cleansing their master data "and also putting the processes in place to ensure they had correct master data because their master was just a critical part of the reporting they wanted to do." Says Carroll: "If the data is junk then you just report junk. If we had our time over again we would have cleaned up the data base before we rolled it out and we would have had stricter processes around master data auditing and cleansing on an ongoing basis."

New Users Training
During the next two years, the retail group continued to refine the reporting in the existing system to match the needs of the burgeoning business and bring people up to speed and using BW properly. "We had a rapidly growing business at BCF that we had to train people and there were new people and new requirements around reporting because the business was changing as it was growing," says Carroll. The company also acquired Goldcross Cycles during that time, which continued the cycle of training up new users and preparing for when they wanted to move from basic reporting into more advanced reporting, as well as developing the existing system. "It was certainly challenging because you had new team members that had to get up to speed with the application but also our way of doing reporting," says Carroll.

What worked well during this period, says Carroll, was the formation of the planning and reporting team who were trained as super users and became the first enquiry point for new users. "They filtered the workload for the BW team and
they could handle the user type queries before they filtered up to the BW team. That also strengthened the relationship
between the planning and reporting team and the brands because they'd get an understanding of what people were doing and why they were doing it," he says.

BI Accelerat or / BW7
In 2009, the company decided there were further opportunities to improve the performance and speed of BW and under
Extend Technologies' guidance, purchased BI Accelerator and upgraded to BW 7.

Though the initial BW implementation in 2006 was quite successful in delivering performance management reporting to the senior executives, says Simpson, "where they struggled after that was going to the next level, the management level before that and the merchandising people and giving them flexible analysis in order to analyse the results out of that." Additionally, being retail, the initial system was around three terabytes which is a very large system, says Simpson. "The large data volume definitely created a lot of challenges rather than creating really flexible reporting for the next level of
analysis underneath their performance reporting."

BW 7 has enabled the company to take advantage of the new level of reporting tools, says Simpson. "This has given their users more flexibility in defining what they'd like their reports to look like and also at the same time they've put in the BI Accelerator and that is probably the thing that's given them really big advantages." Speed is a significant benefit of BI Accelerator and will enable the company to do a range of analysis without delay. "What the Accelerator means is that they can now do the flexible dynamic reporting fast as well. It really opens up a whole range of options that just weren't there
before."

BW 7 is also a lot more user friendly, notes Carroll, for example, using the drag and drop function. "That really enabled us to nail the user acceptance because they liked the new functionality." An upgrade to BW 7 has also prepared the company to implement SAP's CRM module. "That implementation's part complete and relied a lot on BW or BI reporting, so we wanted to make sure we were at the latest version of BW to enable that to happen," says Carroll. The speed that BI Accelerator will give the system is also beneficial for CRM, says Carroll, "because it's going to churn through a lot of data using CRM, we wanted to make sure the system could perform as quickly as it could."

Benefits, Return on Investment and Future Outlook
BI Accelerator has also given SuperCheap Auto Group access to the Business Objects Product Suite "which we're
currently working out what to do with [and] how we're going to best roll that out," says Carroll. The company have recently
purchased Business Objects reporting tools in order to enhance the business user experience, says Simpson. This addition will improve the visualisation and ease of use of the tools and also reduce the development time in creating new reports.

Overall, Carroll says one of the main benefits of SAP is standardised performance reporting, "which has significantly reduced report production time and enabled people to focus on more detailed analysis". Though it's hard to draw a direct link, Carroll says from the merchandise end, the system upgrade has assisted in generating gross margin improvements. "It's reduced report production time in finance, so we can spend more time on planning and analysis.
For example, we've grown the business by around 100 per cent in terms of revenue and reduced the finance reporting team by one person."

Another key advantage, says Simpson, is some of the advancements Extend has put in around inventory. "[These advancements] have really given them a much greater visibility of their supply chain of where their stock outs are, of where they've got too much inventory, and that's really enabled them to optimise their inventory and optimise their supply chain.

I'd say they've got really considerable savings out of that." Carroll also notes the benefit of now having the capability to integrate CRM and achieve more detailed merchandise planning. "It enables you to do better product by product by store planning as opposed to having to do things on a more high level. CRM also gives you great data and actions around the customer." He says the company's two key focus areas for the future are around CRM and on improving their inventory management capabilities. "We've been a challenging customer because we've grown a lot over time so we're continually pushing the envelope in terms of what we can do and [Extend has] always been able to meet that."