noventum realises central enterprise data warehouse for BRITA Group

18. August 2015 //
Data & Analytics

In addition to reporting, analysis, and planning, operational companies in 14 countries can now create their interactive monthly statement with the central DWH and BOARD frontend.

The BRITA family company, headquartered in Taunusstein (Germany), is represented on all five continents as globally active provider in the area of drinking water optimisation, with subsidiaries, shareholdings, and partner companies. Corresponding to the structure of its group of companies, the company needed a central reporting, analysis and - in the future also - planning solution for the quick, automated mapping of the monthly financial statements of the whole group of companies.

The BRITA comptrollers were to be enabled to create efficient monthly financial statements with high data quality worldwide. In addition to the monthly standard reports of finance, cost centre accounting, sales reporting, profit and loss statements, balance sheets and the fixed-asset movement schedules were to be created with a uniform system as well.

The highlight of the solution is a management consolidation implemented in the DWH. There, a conversion of the reports from the 11 currencies of the BRITA Group takes place. In addition, all transformations are performed in order to provide the specialist department with a comfortable report structure and to ensure a good performance in the frontend. In addition to the reporting, the DWH is also the central component for the interactive monthly statement process. This way, it becomes possible for companies abroad that have various ERP systems to immediately see their consolidated result after entering the local monthly statement data. Following these requirements, noventum designed the central data warehouse architecture and implemented it for the medium-sized group of companies. With that, the foundation was created for the BRITA specialist users to independently and flexibly map the reporting and the processes of the monthly financial statement with BOARD.

Setting up a data warehouse requires an understanding of processes, structures, and requirements

While BOARD provides for the integrated frontend reporting, analysis, and planning, noventum has taken on the extraction of the transaction data from the central SAP system. This includes the SAP modules for Profitability Analysis (CO-PA), Cost Center Accounting (CO-OM-CCA), General Ledger Accounting (FI-GL), Asset Accounting (FI-AA) and Sales and Distribution (SD), including the respective master data. The processing of the input of non-SAP companies also takes place in the central DWH.

The data warehouse designed technically and functionally by noventum consulting represents the data backbone of the monthly financial statement. Due to a well thought-out layer architecture it was possible to set up an enterprise DWH, based on Microsoft SQL Server, that is also ready for future challenges. This DWH maps the financial processes of the group of companies at a central location. This way, intercompany transactions as well as transactions with customers can be compared and analysed directly at a glance.

With the noventum SAP know-how, it was possible to utilise corresponding standard extractors from the SAP system. This way, the data is continuously and reliably transmitted from the ERP system to the DWH using the delta process. The processing and mapping of the management consolidation is implemented completely with SSIS. Thanks to the primarily graphical modelling, the logic of the business calculations can now be traced in a structured manner, and it was possible to create a sustainable solution this way.

"For the planned cross-country utilisation and the different time zones associated therewith as well as for parallel data access, we have searched for a solution with a high system performance in which data from SAP and other sources are combined. At the same time, it was supposed to be easy to operate and adaptable, so that the users in the specialist departments have the option to analyse the data independently. With BOARD, we have found the ideal tool to sustainably optimise our decision-making and to noticeably unburden both IT and the specialist departments. The integrative data warehouse architecture conceptualised by noventum does allow us a successful controlling in the future with increased data quality and more efficient processes. The subject matter expertise and the technical know-how of the noventum consultants did considerably contribute to an excellent solution."

Elmar Duba, Director Group Controlling Methods & Business Intelligence at BRITA

"We have been working together with noventum in a trusting relationship for many years already. noventum has excellent database architects whose thorough preparation is a perfect basis for our reporting tool. Jointly, we are creating enterprise architectures in the SAP environment and achieve optimal customer benefits this way."

Jörg Ruff, Director Consulting at BOARD Deutschland GmbH

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