SAP’s net-new customer Ottogi and the team of SAP AppHaus Seoul virtually collaborated to design the Korean company’s new forecast model with an easy-to-use dashboard leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
In a bid to achieving an advantage in a highly competitive ramen market in South Korea, food manufacturing company Ottogi has recently partnered with enterprise giant SAP to develop a forecast model that has advanced analytics capabilities to predict market share, yet is easy to use. The company has selected SAP Cloud Analytics and SAP HANA Cloud to drive innovation and accelerate Ottogi’s journey to becoming an intelligent enterprise.
Chang-kyu, Lee, lead of the Corporate Strategy Analytics team at Ottogi, said:
“We needed analytics that could help put Ottogi ahead of the competition. SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud empower our employees to make better, data-driven decisions based on intelligent predictions.”
For Ottogi, one of the leading food companies in South Korea best known for its curry powder, instant noodles, and other popular products, accurate market share forecasting is critical to achieving its ambition of expanding its market footprint and becoming a world-renowned brand. According to Korea Customs Service, South Korean instant noodle’s growing global popularity is reflected in the export market’s revenue that reached a record high of 368.7 billion won ($319 million) during the first half of 2021, with China as the largest importer .
Recognising Challenges Within Ottogi
Working against the COVID-19 background, Ottogi’s Strategy Analytics team and SAP conducted a remote workshop, including user research activities, to gain insights into the pain points and user needs within Ottogi’s existing work processes. The SAP project team identified key challenges such as:
- Difficulties with data preprocessing for end users
- Consolidating disparate data and standardising units done manually with MS Excel
- Cumbersome data sharing across stakeholder groups
- Forecasting accuracy needs improvement
Recognising these key issues drove the team to design a tool that would significantly enhance both the data preprocessing activities and the quality of their forecast model. The team also leveraged SAP Analytics Cloud to provide all stakeholders access to real time one source of data.
The team was on a mission to improve the market share forecast accuracy and enable more granular segmentation of market share data. In addition to streamlining data preprocessing to increase employee productivity, the SAP-Ottogi project team also focused on enhancing the existing workflow to make real-time sharing of market share forecasts easier across organisations and to enable data-driven decision-making.
New Forecast Model Powered by SAP Business Technology Platform
The project team proposed a new forecast model leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform, which brings together intelligent enterprise applications with database and data management, analytics, integration, and extension capabilities into one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments including hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications.
Built on SAP HANA Cloud predictive analytics library, one of the database and data management solutions under SAP BTP, Ottogi’s new forecast model resulted to:
- Increased forecast accuracy
- Increased segmentation by geographic region, product category, and product brand, comprising 152 different values
- Shortened forecast cycles from monthly to weekly with the new dashboard that provides more accurate market share forecasting
- Enabled marketing and sales teams to create their strategies using weekly market share analyses
- Provided accurate, in-depth insights into its current market share on a more granular level due to stronger segmentation capabilities, enabling more sophisticated and strategic decision
Having experienced the improvement in ramen market share forecasting, Ottogi is looking into extending the coverage of the forecast model to other products within its portfolio.
“Choosing SAP as an innovation partner was a crucial first step for Ottogi toward becoming an intelligent enterprise,” shared Junyoung Chang, industry account executive for SAP P&T Sales in Korea. “The successful outcome of this project proves the high potential of SAP Business Technology Platform to drive business innovation and will significantly enhance customer success.”
