Inforte Delivers Web-Only Reporting Solution For Beverage And Confectionary Manufacturer's Far Eastern Unit

Company Background

Our client is one of the largest international beverage and confectionary companies in the world, with a multi-billion dollar market capitalization and 50,000+ employees.

In early 2003, the client acquired another leading confectionary, making the company a joint number one global confectionary, a leader in sugar production and number two in chewing gum. Subsequently, the acquisition allowed the organization to offer more products to its customers and gain access into new major markets.

Prior successes at several worldwide sites including other beverage and confectionary companies made Inforte an obvious choice for this project.

Business Issue

Along with the task of integrating the acquisition and international business units, this Far Eastern component was migrating from an AS-400/Business Objects solution to an SAP system. Changes made would have to successfully coexist without interruption of the food and beverage operation using the same design and infrastructure.

The unit's challenges consisted of delivering static reports to business analysts and sales personnel who did not have a need for SAP training and expensive user licensing.

Inforte's Solution

Inforte was hired to assist the Far Eastern unit with the transition of their SalesNet reporting. SalesNet is a statically delivered, Web-only reporting solution that is provided to both business analysts and sales personnel with crucial up-to-date information from their data warehouse. Inforte's product expertise led to further responsibilities such as data reconciliation, legacy history loading, new business reports and data model performance tuning.

Business Benefits Delivered

Inforte delivered a Web-only solution, which involved building a custom intranet site for the acquired unit and the international business units. Everyday, more than 90 reports are refreshed with the latest information from their SAP BW data warehouse. This entire process can be executed and completed within 10 minutes and involves no user licensing issues, saving the organization the cost associated with more than 150 users. The solution also allows flexibility for new reports to be delivered via SalesNet with minimal configuration changes.