Assisting the Agfa team on analytics challenges
About Agfa
Agfa-Gevaert N.V. (Agfa) is a Belgian multinational that develops, produces and distributes an extensive range of analog and digital imaging products, software, and systems. Customers can mainly be found in the printing industry and healthcare sector, but in specific industries as well.
The company consists of four divisions: Offset Solutions, Digital Print & Chemicals, Radiology Solutions and HealthCare IT.
Of course, Agfa is also well known for their popular films, which were used in many people’s analog cameras back in the days.
The Challenge
Reporting, budgeting, planning, … all of it is being facilitated by Agfa’s 4 large SAP BW on HANA systems in the back end and Business Explorer, Business Objects and Analytics Cloud in the front end. Each day new data, requirements and issues pop up, and Cubis assists the Agfa Business Analytics Team to respond to these challenges in the best way possible.
The sources for all the data in the BW systems range from flat files, SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA to non-SAP systems.
Our consultants participate in large and small projects, as well as in the day-to-day work which must be done to keep the reporting environment running in an optimal way.
The Solution
Reporting in many domains
Finance, HR, Sales, Services, … those are just a few of the numerous domains Agfa needs reporting for. Each division can have different requirements for reporting for each of their domains, so not all 4 BW systems are the same. In some cases, data and logic from these 4 systems must be unified for company-wide reporting. Of course, a hybrid approach – combination of BW and HANA modeling – is applied if beneficial or necessary to the required outcome
Real-time operational reporting on S/4HANA
Since S/4HANA offers the perfect solutions to perform real-time operational reporting, this has been set up at Agfa for Financial reporting and is mainly used for checking reports.
Cubis helped Agfa in setting up the analytical modeling on S/4HANA for real-time reporting in Analysis for Office, facilitated by Core Data Services in a virtual way.
SAP Analytics Cloud for modern and user-friendly reporting
To be able to stay ahead of the contemporary needs in its reporting, Agfa makes use of SAP Analytics Cloud for their latest and most modern reporting and dashboarding. Not only the modern and user-friendly interface makes SAP Analytics Cloud the perfect solution for this, but also the fact that it can be used in a self-service manner is a huge win for Agfa. When the required data is available in BW or HANA, business users can create their own stories without the need of the IT department.
The roll-out of SAP Analytics Cloud is still in its initialization phase, with some first productive dashboards already. However, it is gaining more and more interest from, and it is being adopted by more and more reporting users over time.
To make sure all features Analytics Cloud has to offer are being used in the best way, Agfa relies on Cubis to help them to gain knowledge about it, set up and implement everything which is necessary and provide demos and training to the reporting users.
Technologies used
SAP BW on HANA, SAP Business Objects, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP S/4HANA
“For many years already, Agfa can rely on Cubis as its main analytics partner. Their knowledge and expertise in the field of SAP Analytics really helps to battle the most challenging and demanding analytics questions.”
Frank Haes
Head of ICS services for BI, Agfa
