Even for global organisations such as Chr. Hansen, a leading manufacturer of natural ingredients and enzymes with its headquarters in Denmark, data and IT systems are not always completely aligned. Challenges will inevitably arise as requirements for the exchange of business critical data across the entire organisation increase.

In the case of Chr. Hansen, the company’s regional office for South and Central America, situated in São Paulo, needed to ramp up its Business Intelligence system and find a viable way to merge data and report to global headquarters in Denmark.

“The challenge was that the organisation in Brazil had some requirements that our corporate SAP BW system could not meet, at least not without launching a large development project. It simply didn’t make sense in that we have 10 users in Brazil and nearly 800 users on the corporate system, explains Jens Rasmussen, Director Business Intelligence at Chr. Hansen’s global headquarters in Denmark.

Easier for everyone

Together with Leonardo M. Salado, Regional IT Manager SA & CA, he set about searching for workarounds and also enrolled help from Affecto with whom Chr. Hansen has worked with previously. It quickly became clear that the brand new, cloud based SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand service was worth a closer look.

“One of our goals was to find a solution that eliminates the need for working with large and very complex Excel sheets. Another goal - which also fits into our long term Business Intelligence strategy - is to make access to data easier for everyone, including a lot of people who don’t need to work with a Business Intelligence system on a daily basis, but who will benefit greatly from having access to certain information whenever, wherever they need it. SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand meets those demands,” explains Jens Rasmussen.

The right choice

Affecto helped Chr. Hansen with licensing SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand for the Brazilian organisation and Leonardo M. Salado and his team are confident they made the right choice:

“A hosted solution offers a number of benefits for us: We don’t have the burden of hosting and maintaining a large system on our own servers, and SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand is very easy to set up. Response times are really short, it is intuitive and easy to use and we have access to the data we need - in the way we and our global headquarters need,” says Leonardo M. Salado.

Soon Chr. Hansen’s BI people on both sides of the Atlantic will benefit from SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand’s built-in features for building dashboards, graphs and charts to provide updated performance data at-a-glance to management and sales managers.

A new set of option

While the project has until now been about overcoming some very specific challenges limited to an equally specific part of the business, Chr. Hansen’s step into cloud based Business Intelligence may very well prove to be the first in a series of steps towards a new way of offering and using BI services. Says Jens Rasmussen:

"When BI is offered as Software-as-a-Service, you suddenly have a whole new set of options. One of the most obvious is that since users are not required to access the BI system from inside the corporate firewall anymore, the next thought that comes to mind is mobile access. Mobile access to data is already central part of our global BI strategy and we will definitely explore the possibilities further.

“With SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand we can also test the dashboard features in a small-scale, controlled environment without having to affect 800 users of our current SAP BW system.”