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FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
WHY READ THIS REPORT
With in-memory technologies gaining maturity, application development and delivery professionals
should consider making it part of their data management platform to support faster analytics, predictive
analytics, and extreme transaction volumes. Maple Leaf Foods is at the forefront of in-memory analytics,
a technology that enables the company to deliver faster business analytics and new insights to improve its
proftability. Tis Forrester case study looks at Maple Leaf Foods path to success with SAP HANA and its
future plans.
Case Study: Maple Leaf Foods Relies On SAP
HANA To Enable Faster Business Analytics
by Noel Yuhanna
with Holger Kisker, Ph.D. and David Murphy
OCTOBER 28, 2013
THE SITUATION: MULTIPLE ERP SYSTEMS FAILED TO SUPPORT AGILITY
Maple Leaf Foods is a leading food company headquartered in Toronto, with operations across Canada,
the US, the UK, Asia, and Mexico. Te company employs approximately 19,500 people and had sales of
$4.9 billion in 2012. Maple Leaf Foods primarily focuses on meat and bakery products that have a very
short shelf life; therefore, pricing is critical to proftability. As the result of acquiring a number of other
companies, by 2008 Maple Leaf Foods had ended up with more than 65 plants and 35 legacy enterprise
resource planning (ERP) systems across the organization. Most of its analytics were based on weekly
information and integrated analytics across systems a situation that proved extremely challenging to
long-term maintenance and support. Maple Leaf Foods wanted a single ERP system, integrated analytics
across business functions, and faster analytics to support real-time decision-making.
Te company launched Project LeapFrog in 2008, which focused on consolidating the 35 ERP systems into
one instance and deploying common business processes across the entire organization of bakery, protein,
and agriculture operations in Canada, the US, and the UK, enabled by a single vanilla instance of SAP. In
its initial SAP release, Maple Leaf Foods rolled out SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) running
on an Oracle database. Even with SAP BW on a standard database platform, the team realized that it
was not going to meet all of its needs from a performance and ad hoc analysis perspective. Although the
BusinessObjects solution helped achieve ad hoc analysis, key performance issues that afected critical data
analysis prevailed. Tats when the team started to look at options for data acceleration in key areas that
could help improve proftability and gain a competitive advantage.
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
Case Study: Maple Leaf Foods Relies On SAP HANA To Enable Faster Business Analytics 2
2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited October 28, 2013
THE SOLUTION: DEPLOYING SAP HANA AS A SIDECAR FOR BUSINESS ANALYTICS
Forrester spoke with Michael Correa, vice president of information solutions at Maple Leaf Foods,
to learn more about the companys road to faster business analytics. Te key reason that Maple Leaf
Foods went with SAP HANA was to support real-time analytics and provide users with a broader
range of analytical views, new insights, and ad hoc requests to meet growing business needs.
1
SAP
HANA is a fully ACID-compliant, in-memory, columnar, massively parallel processing platform
to support online transaction processing and online analytical processing workloads.
2
Correa told
Forrester that In the fall of 2011, we made the decision to go with SAP HANA, enabling it as a
sidecar. Te choice we made was not to replace the underlying database for BW back then, but to
create a standalone version of HANA.
Te most important data in SAP HANA for the company is invoiced sales, including volume, sales,
spending, and proftability. Although Maple Leaf Foods has performed analytics for more than a
decade, HANA was able to support new kinds of analytics, answering questions like How do I price
my products tomorrow based on market demand and supply? and How do I respond to customers
or consumers because of this price and volume elasticity? Because Maple Leaf Foods initial HANA
instance was less than 1 terabyte, the company chose which data it accelerated carefully. Proftability
was a key focus, so Maple Leaf Foods prioritized data related to customers, proft and loss, price
elasticity, sales, and marketing. Te frm used SAP ETL and Data Services to load and integrate data
into HANA.
THE RESULTS: SAP HANA ENHANCED BUSINESS DECISION-MAKING
In early 2012, Maple Leaf Foods made SAP HANA available to more than 800 business users, bringing
data from BW originating in the CO-PA, CRM, and TPM modules to support business analytics.
Maple Leaf Foods was the frst Canadian corporation to go live with HANA. From the user perspective,
the frm was able to achieve faster ad hoc analytics to run its day-to-day operations. Dr. E. Jefrey
Hutchinson, global CIO of Maple Leaf Foods, said: Were currently deploying SAPs Business
Planning and Consolidation ofering on top of HANA to enable enhanced planning not previously
available. Maple Leaf Foods realized a number of signifcant benefts with HANA, including:
Running faster analytics to improve decision-making. SAP HANA runs queries, reports, and
ad hoc requests very quickly compared with Maple Leaf Foods traditional SAP platform. Correa
said, In some cases, HANA has performed 100 to 1,000 times faster than our BW platform
running on a traditional database. Faster analytics means supporting and creating more reports
and queries and generating new insights compared with the old system of canned reports.
Removing complexity and enabling collaboration. Maple Leaf Foods claims that SAP HANA
simplifed its business rules, processes, and data. Te frm greatly streamlined its report output,
going from more than 500 named reports across multiple ERP systems to 25 standardized,
common reports across the entire organization.
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
Case Study: Maple Leaf Foods Relies On SAP HANA To Enable Faster Business Analytics 3
2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited October 28, 2013
Supporting a self-service data platform. Not only does SAP HANA deliver faster analytics, it
also delivers a self-service data platform that allows users to play with the data in real time to
support their data needs. Traditionally, Maple Leaf Foods had hundreds of canned reports
but with HANA, users are now able to run ad hoc queries and reports to create new insights to
help with decision-making.
Delivering a standardized view across the organization. Maple Leaf Foods was able to
standardize the view across all of its consumer packaged goods and agricultural operational
businesses, enabling the frm to analyze its business and run it in a more standardized and
collaborative manner.
LESSONS LEARNED: SAP HANA IS MATURE AND DELIVERS FASTER TIME-TO-
VALUE
SAP HANA ofers many use cases, including real-time and faster analytics, predictive analytics, and
real-time apps. Since its launch two years ago, HANA has undergone several product enhancements,
bug fxes, and integrations with other SAP products. Today, HANA is mature, stable, and ofers
tighter integration with SAP BW, SAP modules, replication servers, modeling tools, and other
SAP products. Correa summed up the value of HANA well: Its beyond a new technology its
a new way of thinking. We are learning new ways to use HANA. Lessons learned from HANA
implementations include:
Migrating from the database under SAP BW to HANA is not too complex. While the
perception has been that using SAP HANA is complex and requires efort, SAP HANA Studio
and integration with other tools makes deployment simpler. Correa again: We fnd that
migrations from the traditional database under BW to the HANA database under BW, or using
HANA as a sidecar, is easy to set up, integrate, and implement.
Te data that goes into SAP HANA must be chosen wisely. Memory is precious, so use it
wisely dont load HANA with just any data. Choosing what SAP and non-SAP data goes into
HANA can help accelerate the data thats critical to supporting real-time insights. Using HANA
as a sidecar initially can help improve time-to-value.
Finding SAP HANA resources can be challenging. Although Forrester estimates that there are
about 1,000 HANA deployments worldwide, fnding technical professionals with SAP and in-
memory computing expertise can be very challenging, as the number of technical professionals
with knowledge and experience of in-memory technologies including HANA remains limited.
Consider not only training administrators and database administrators on HANA, but also
leveraging consulting frms, especially for large and complex deployments.
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
Case Study: Maple Leaf Foods Relies On SAP HANA To Enable Faster Business Analytics 4
2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited October 28, 2013
Next Steps: Implement Predictive Analytics And Extend Data Acceleration
Although Maple Leaf Foods has already achieved dramatic results from Project LeapFrog, the
company anticipates additional benefts from SAP HANA, including further accelerating its
data and refreshing that data more frequently. As it further extends HANA to support predictive
analytics, Maple Leaf Foods will be able to help price products based on price fuctuations of wheat,
pork, and chicken. It will also be able to leverage syndicated data from sources like Nielsen to
provide real-time pricing information to business users.
We will grow HANA as the demand for data acceleration increases. We are evaluating
many new use cases, such as recipe development, demand planning, production planning,
and trade promotion, that will help us improve decisions and proftability even further.
We are currently launching a fnancial consolidation and planning tool natively on the
HANA database and may expand direct application use on HANA. (Michael Correa, vice
president of information solutions, Maple Leaf Foods)
RE COMME NDAT I ONS
INVEST IN DISTRIBUTED IN-MEMORY TECHNOLOGIES TO GAIN COMPETITIVE
EDGE
Its all about making informed decisions by leveraging your business data. Te investments you
have already made in data warehouses and business intelligence solutions provide the foundation
to support your business, but these alone are not good enough to stay competitive. Te next-
generation data platform demands that you invest in new technologies to help your frm deliver
the speed, agility, and new insights critical to helping your business grow. SAP HANA is a viable
distributed in-memory data platform that enterprises can use to support real-time analytics, faster
insights, and extreme transaction volumes. In addition to SAP, other vendors that ofer solutions
to help deliver an in-memory data platform include IBM, Oracle, and Microsof. Application
development and delivery professionals who are considering implementing an in-memory data
platform should start small, storing only those data sets in memory that need acceleration, and
expanding over time to include other data sets. Firms that invest heavily in new in-memory
technologies will be able to respond more quickly to business needs and competitive threats and
grow faster than their competitors.
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
Case Study: Maple Leaf Foods Relies On SAP HANA To Enable Faster Business Analytics 5
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ENDNOTES
1
SAP HANA combines database, data processing, and application platform capabilities in memory to
support operational analytics, predictive and text analytics, and extreme transaction volumes. Source: SAP
(http://www.saphana.com/community/about-hana).
2
SAP HANA is a columnar relational database management system that can leverage and turbocharge your
existing BI applications. Unlike other RDBMSes, columnar can process data in columns rather than rows.
See the May 27, 2011, Its The Dawning Of The Age Of BI DBMS report.