Full Speed Ahead with SAP HANA – Data Management Defined

The new dynamic of today’s global economy is one of constant change; where the pace of innovation that once took years to yield new technologies, marketable products and services is growing exponentially. Underlying this new economy are significant shifts that require fast-growing small to midsized enterprises (SMEs) to find new ways to increase operational efficiencies and accelerate their growth to keep pace with competition. According to Gartner, soaring data volumes associated with more business transactions are estimated to increase by a staggering 650% over the next five years. Coupled with the expectation for instant access to accurate information across the entire supply chain, SMEs are faced with obtaining immediate business insight into large volumes of operational data.

By adopting a real-time business approach, whereby a company conducts a range of business activities in real-time, including the gathering and acting upon business intelligence, SMEs can achieve benefits at both operational and management levels. Supporting real-time business operations is in-memory analytics, which takes a different approach than traditional business intelligence systems. Rather than storing business data on various external disks and caching bits of data in a computer’s random access memory (RAM), real-time intelligence puts the data directly into RAM. Technological innovations in computing power and storage have made it possible to store large amounts of data in RAM than ever before, and as a result SMEs have access to extremely fast query responses.

Effectively managing big data is no longer reserved just for large enterprises. SMEs have many advantages over larger competitors and now leveraging SAP Business One with HANA, they have access to big company performance priced to meet the needs of small businesses.  SAP Business One, version for HANA enables SMEs to perform real-time analysis on very large volumes of transactional data with zero impact on business systems. By allowing businesses to move from after-event analysis to real-time decision making, business users are empowered to react immediately to changing market opportunities.

SAP Business One, version for HANA benefits SMEs across many industries including:

• Better demand forecasting based on huge data volumes
• Real-time risk management for businesses that are closing new policies, and quicker calculation of cumulated risks in corresponding areas
• Improved trade promotions and supply chain management processes for product companies using advanced forecasting algorithms based on point-of-sale data.

Additionally, businesses that currently employ SAP Business One and SMEs that are new users to the platform do not have to be concerned with outgrowing SAP. The SAP HANA platform has been designed for scalability, easily handling more data and delivering even better performance as more users access the software at the same time. This means that as your workforce expands and more users access the system, you won’t have to worry about outgrowing SAP Business One.

To learn more about how businesses are now adopting real-time decision making through business systems that support in-memory technology for faster processing times read the Oxford Economics whitepaper; “Real-time Business”.