Implementing a successful business intelligence framework means meeting end-user needs

About Heuschen & Schrouff

When you visit the Asian supermarket to buy your favourite food items, you might end up going home with products supplied by Heuschen & Schrouff! This company is the leading supplier of Asian supermarkets in Western Europe, and has introduced authentic Asian food to mainstream Retail and Foodservice. Like YumYum-noodles, Amoy soy sauce and other fine specialties from around the globe. 45 authentic Asian a-brands from Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, China, Vietnam and Korea have given Heuschen & Schrouff Food Group the exclusive distribution rights for the EU.

Match your business ambitions to your BI ambitions

Dave Weckseler (Manager SAP & senior business analyst at Heuschen & Schrouff): “Last year’s challenge was to realize our Business Intelligence Roadmap ambitions, upgrading our BI system and gain more knowledge about existing markets, existing product groups and optimizing our business processes’. This leads to our current BI roadmap in which we combine system consolidation with new technologies and real-time access to our data.”

Old vs. New

Heuschen & Schrouff previously used an outdated BI system, technologically at the end of its lifespan. Dave: “It was a time-consuming system for the end-users. Even more important, due to the lack of an integrated overview of the most important business processes, like purchasing, sales, warehousing, marketing and finance, we had no real-time insights to make better and faster business decisions.”

Based on the goals and growth aspirations, Heuschen & Schrouff has transitioned, together with delaware, to a new integral BI system that enables (near) real-time analysis based on data from their SAP ECC system and thus on key processes. SAP HANA Live Sidecar has been selected with SAP BusinessObjects BI tools. Dave: “Throughout any Business Intelligence implementation process, it is likely that we will need to overcome a number of challenges.. By involving our end users in this process, it allowed us to take the software requirement into account from the end user perspective.”

Self-service environment

Where do you start when you have no in-house expertise in implementing a BI framework? Dave: “Working with experts is a big advantage. It gave us the opportunity to focus on our own demands: the quality of our data, our need for insights, ownership of the different KPIs and data visualization. We are very happy with our self-service environment for creating ad hoc queries and analysis of data. The BI solution architect of delaware supports the team from a technical point of view and manages the core project components of scope, cost and time.”