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.”

The post SAP Business Technology Platform Powers Ottogi’s Forecast Model appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

The Asia Pacific region’s adoption of cloud technology and 5G have accelerated in recent years. APAC is pegged to be the world’s largest 5G region and to increase cloud revenue by 87 percent over the four-year period to the beginning of 2025. 

The rewards of the region’s brisk adoption of cloud technology and investment in 5G have been evident, especially in the time of COVID-19. During the 10th anniversary celebration of its in-memory data platform SAP HANA, SAP executives expressed their confidence in the region’s readiness in thriving in the current business environment and in driving the value of data amid the pandemic.

Leveraging 5G Technology 

APAC is anticipated to reach 675 million connections or over half of the global volume by 2025. China, Japan, and South Korea, with mobile operators investing $370 billion between 2018 and 2025 building out their 5G networks, are expected to drive 5G growth in the region.

Irfan Khan, SAP’s President of Platform and Technologies, shared with ZDNet that APAC’s aggressive rollout of 5G networks placed the region in a favorable position in these extraordinary times. He also added that businesses in the region could leverage its broad and robust ecosystem of developers, including citizen developers, who tapped new tools to rapidly create workloads.

Early Adoption SAP HANA Cloud

Aneesha Shenoy, SAP Asia Pacific Japan Senior Vice President and Head of Platform and Technologies, shared that enterprises in APAC were transitioning faster along with embracing 5G. She shared that this was manifested in the region’s adoption of SAP HANA Cloud and Data Warehouse Cloud, which were released in the late-second quarter of 2020.

According to Shenoy, businesses in the region were realising the power of data to facilitate better human resources, inventory, or financial planning and maintenance. One instance that she mentioned underpinning the value of data is when healthcare institutions leverage SAP HANA Analytics Cloud during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the cloud solution, institutions gain better visibility on the inventory of personal protective equipment (PPE) or which hospitals could accommodate more patients.

Looking into the future of data, Khan projected that in the next decade, there would be ubiquitous access to all the data one owned, regardless of where the data resided– whether it was in an edge network, device, hybrid cloud, or in a legacy system. He explained that to be able to achieve this, there would need to be a semantic layer much like an orchestration of processes. 

SAP HANA’s Roadmap

Next in the pipeline is SAP HANA 2.0, which featured hybrid cloud support with SAP HANA Cloud and could query SAP HANA Cloud and return results that tapped capabilities in machine learning. With SAP HANA 2.0, customers have an option to choose between accessing data through federated query and replication. 

Khan explained that the reason behind the need for SAP HANA to be converged with SAP HANA Cloud is to support enterprises that are moving away from on-premise environments to cloud-native and would want to be able to move to a hyperscale infrastructure. He said that SAP HANA Cloud was designed to be a gateway to all data, in line with the emergence of edge computing, IoT, and distributed storage.

“It’s modern data processing that’s fit for purpose, where the real-world data is,” he said. 

The post SAP HANA Cloud, 5G in Asia to Drive Data Growth appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system from enterprise software solutions provider SAP. It was the first data platform to deliver real-time analytics on live transactions and provides the foundation for a data-driven enterprise to turn data into true business value. The solution is used by more than 32,000 customers. It combines a robust database with services for creating innovative applications for businesses to overcome complex data landscape and scale data management at a lower TCO (total cost of ownership).

With its advanced technological features, SAP HANA offers faster access to data in multicore CPUs through its fault-tolerant search capabilities, faster memory reads, and real-time data analytics. It can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid environment from several leading cloud service providers including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and Huawei FusionSphere.

The new features of the database platform include hybrid extensions to the cloud, enhanced developer experience, increased scale and data reliability with tiered storage capabilities, external key server enablement, advanced data analytical processing, and improved predictive and machine learning. In addition, SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 offers an extended five-year support and maintenance commitment to customers.

Customers in the Asia Pacific region who have found success with SAP HANA include:

• Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), an energy storage company in China that specializes in the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage systems, as well as battery management systems.
• Maharashtra State Power Generation Co. Ltd. (Mahagenco), the second largest power producing company in India.
• Prism Johnson Limited (Formerly Prism Cement Limited), one of India’s leading integrated Building Materials Company.

Seamless Cloud Adoption with SAP HANA

Cloud adoption has seen significant growth in recent years, with many enterprises continuing to embrace multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies in an effort to improve the scalability of their internet-based database capabilities while reducing costs and risks. According to the ninth Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, at the top of organizations’ 2020 priority list is optimizing their existing cloud use, followed by migrating more workloads to the cloud. Further, a fresh Gartner survey on cloud adoption says that 80{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of respondents using public cloud are using more than one cloud service provider.

As the only fully-managed multi-cloud support on all leading cloud service providers, SAP HANA is well-positioned in providing crucial support to enterprises in their journey to the cloud. To support customers in getting started with transitioning to the cloud, SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 adds new features that optimize data replication and distribution of processing to support hybrid scenarios between SAP HANA Cloud and SAP HANA on-premise.

Hybrid scenarios help businesses leverage their on-premise investment while still taking advantage of the flexibility of the cloud. Extending workloads or processes from SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA data lake as well as other cloud data storage such as AWS Athena and Google BigQuery is made easier through the SAP HANA Cloud gateway. SAP HANA further increases flexibility and cost reduction with enhanced cloud backup integration that allows the implementation of SAP HANA database backup and restoration directly from AWS S3.

The post Achieving Cloud Freedom with SAP HANA appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.