An Industrial Gas supplier streamlined their operations by enabling data-driven decision making on a unified data and analytics platform

A leading supplier of industrial gases, based out of the US needed a strategic direction towards becoming a more data-driven organization. Applexus engaged with them to revamp their analytics strategy to operationalize analytics-driven business outcomes. With analytics at the helm, our client envisaged a reinvention of their supply chain and plant operations.

Challenges

With the adverse impact of COVID 19, organizations faced continuing pressure to streamline their operations to reduce costs. However, in a post COVID scenario, the industry is poised to grow at a CAGR of 7.2% in the 2021-2026 period. Our client, faced with the dynamic market needs, needed a turnaround strategy to instill a purposeful and analytics-driven culture.

• Although the data available was abundant it lacked a unified view. Thus, the right set of data seldom reached the right people at the right time for analyzing and consuming insights. This limited our client's ability to leverage data and insights to drive business outcomes.
• To sustain continuous cost pressures, our client needed to drive operational and cost efficiencies in their plant operations and supply chain effectiveness.
• Pre-defined static reporting hindered the consumption of analytics and introduced delay and guesswork in the decision-making process.
• There was an urgent need of building a robust analytics community to bring about a data-driven decision-making culture across the organization.

Solution

Applexus engaged with the client to modernize their analytics landscape by unifying data from all the sources in a single platform. Assessing their unique information challenges, Applexus designed a strategy to deliver data-driven insights to support their business priorities.

• A unified analytics technology platform on SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud was designed to unify data from both SAP and non-SAP sources.
• Modern data architecture and analytics processes were developed on SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud. Self-service consumption of analytics was implemented to empower users with insights. Moreover, to drive the change management adoption boot camps were also conducted.
• High impact analytics use cases unique to the manufacturing/chemicals industry - spend analytics, customer satisfaction analytics, plant maintenance, and operations analytics, etc. were designed and delivered.
• A collaborative analytics community was established, showcasing the potential of analytics to drive smarter sharing of insights for data-led decision making.
• Applexus partnered and collaborated with SAP Product Management and SAP COE on an early adopter program to deliver an optimal solution.

Results

The solutions enabled a transition from the on-premise data warehouse to the SAP Business Technology Platform. With an integrated view of the data and self-service consumption of analytics, our client could deliver insight-driven business outcomes. Several high ROI business use cases were built in an agile fashion within 6-8 weeks, ensuring the faster realization of value. The business cases improved the efficiency of supply chain & plant operations and enhanced customer satisfaction. Moreover, with optimized and streamlined operations, overall costs were also reduced. .