by Pierce Owen, VP, Research & Publishing, SAPinsider Change management emerged as the top challenge for SAP deployments in previous SAPinsider research. In the case of Breakthru Beverage Group — a North American alcoholic beverage wholesaler headquartered in Cicero, Illinois, with approximately 7,000 employees across North America — the successful implementation of SAP HANA 2.0-based business intelligence products required an evolution in its change management strategy. SAPinsider recently interviewed Desmond Foley, Solutions Architect for Business Intelligence at Breakthru Beverage, to understand how the company effectively communicated with different sets of stakeholders to improve the usage and user acceptance of SAP HANA-based analytics tools.

Different Categories of Change

In 2019, Breakthru upgraded from SAP HANA 1.0 to SAP HANA 2.0. “We learned some best practices for modelling on the SAP HANA 2.0 environment, but the upgrade didn’t change things for our internal customers much. The upgrades were mostly under the covers,” shares Foley. The version 2.0 upgrade included enhanced support for cloud applications, persistent memory, and machine learning as well as hyper-converged infrastructure certification. These upgrades, while important, had very little visible effect on the day-to-day activities of business users. Foley considers this kind of major technology upgrade, where internal customers do not notice the change, as the first type of change. The second major category for change is teaching users to use different or new tools. “Day-to-day activities actually change when the internal customers must use a new platform rather than using the same platform with a new underlying technology,” says Foley. “To get some people to use a new platform, you must cut the apron strings from the old system. Our old sales analytics systems were well architected, which inhibited the adoption of the newer SAP tools, despite their improved built-in functionality.” After getting internal customers to use a new system, an organization then goes through what Foley calls the enablement phase, where business users must learn new ways of thinking. “At Breakthru, we are going from report-driven to analytics-driven decision making, which can be disruptive on all levels,” says Foley. He and his senior management team want to make decisions based on analytics forecasts rather than only reviews of past results. With people working from home in need of different ways to interact with support staff, Breakthru has found self-service analytics forecasts hold critical value. It has witnessed big swings in consumption patterns across its customer base. Demand has risen for some products while other products – favored by restaurants and bars – have experienced a temporary decline. With unprecedented disruption in the markets Breakthru serves and its own employee analysts working remotely, the investment in self-service BI and analytics tools from SAP has helped Breakthru associates continue supporting suppliers and retailers on the front line as it fulfills orders and meets demand, despite the volatile nature of the market during the COVID-19 crisis.

Different Experiences of Change

Different groups and types of stakeholders experience change differently from each other. Therefore, change management requires different approaches and tactics to meet the needs of each group. “The C-level and C-minus-one executives advocate change, push change, and fund change, but they do not often experience change. They consume information presented to them and make decisions. They want to make better-informed decisions, but they want the presentation of information to feel minimally different,” says Foley. Foley’s IT organization, on the other hand, must provide the tools and then support the users of those tools. “The best IT organizations don’t only generate ideas anymore, but rather try to meet the demands of all their stakeholders,” says Foley. In Breakthru’s case, that means filling the role of a trusted partner in providing timely, accurate, and curated information, and making it easy for business users to access that information. “Developers are not as close to the business as the IT leaders. They’re one step removed. They used to be like a factory shop — receive orders and fulfill orders — but not anymore,” says Foley. Now, Foley’s team tries to promote a two-way flow of information between developers and business users so that the developers understand why they need to build an application a certain way, and business users understand the capabilities of the developers. Breakthru’s current strategy puts more forward-looking SAP analytics tools in the hands of its internal business analyst community. “This group is highly motivated, and we have to keep up with their expectations. They’re tech savvy. It’s part of their day-to-day thinking, and they get exposure to all kinds of new technologies. They’re ambitious, and sometimes, it’s hard to keep up with them,” says Foley. The needs of the analysts in terms of data curation often outstrip the IT organization’s ability to meet those needs. Therefore, Foley’s group tries to empower the analysts with no-code, self-service data analytics tools that integrate with SAP ERP, such as Alteryx, Microsoft Power BI, and machine learning or artificial intelligence products designed for data citizens rather than data scientists. “Because we won’t be able to keep up with their demands, we have to manage expectations and empower them,” says Foley. Currently, Breakthru’s supply chain analysts use a highly curated, pivot-table-based reporting system, and IT provides the data infrastructure for analysts to create curated reports. The C-level executives want to replace this with data extraction tools within the SAP HANA business intelligence environment, so that analysts can have ad-hoc access to the data in a self-guided manner. This way, they can use the most up-to-date data to generate demand forecasts, project lead times, monitor inventory, and perform turnover analyses without waiting on the IT team. To get to this state, the IT organization and the developers have to work with the analysts and the C-level executives to understand their needs and their vision. “We’ve adopted agile-style development to handle this type of large-scale change management,” says Foley. “The previous system worked well, and it was customized to meet their needs. However, with Microsoft Power BI integrated with the SAP HANA environment, the analysts will be able to drive their own forward-looking analyses.” As a result of these types of projects, usage of SAP systems has gone up exponentially at Breakthru. “We found a little bit of a partisan divide with a small minority of users that prefer stability and showed an unwillingness to change. But once we showed the analysts the functionality and speed-of-thought capabilities of the SAP HANA system, they usually want to use the new analytics tools to access it themselves and embrace their newfound independence. Now, instead of relying on IT to curate data, they generate their own reports ad-hoc,” concludes Foley.

What Does This Mean for the SAPinsider Community?

Based on our research and the interview with Foley, the following considerations can help the SAPinsider Community better implement new analytics tools:

• Plan out each type of change management. Some types of technology upgrades might have significant benefits without really affecting how people work. Others require a change in tools and day-to-day activities, while still others require a change in thinking. Classify the types of changes you will be making, and build a plan based on the category and the stakeholders involved.
• Identify the project’s major stakeholders and collaborate with all of them to understand their needs and vision. The strategy for Breakthru’s latest supply chain project will bring together IT and the developers with the analysts to ensure two-way communication. This strategy will ensure that the project fulfills the C-level vision while meeting the needs of the business analysts and maximizing the capabilities of IT and the developers.
• Give business users the ability to run their own analytics on SAP data with self-service tools. Foley knew that Breakthru’s business analysts would not efficiently leverage the SAP data if they had to wait for IT to develop curated reports for every piece of information they needed. To keep up with the analysts’ demands, Breakthru had to empower them with self-service analytics tools.
• Extend the core system rather than customize it. Previously, Breakthru ran a highly customized environment that ran exactly the reports it needed but did not have forward-looking analytics. By relying on SAP HANA 2.0 as the core and extending it through self-service tools, Breakthru now has a system it can upgrade without disrupting operations.

Following this strategic guidance should help the SAPinsider Community implement new analytics tools in a way that increases usage and leads to better-informed decision making. Pierce Owen, Vice President of Research & Publishing, SAPinsider, can be reached at Pierce.Owen@wispubs.com.