Broadcasting in premium electronics product and accessory distribution
Aqipa GmbH, an Austria-based company, specializes in the distribution and marketing of premium consumer electronics products and accessories, covering multiple categories, including audio, active lifestyle products, imaging and home electronics.
As a family-owned, pan-European distributor, Aqipa collaborates with brands like GoPro, Marshall, JBL, Pure, and JLAB. The company offers a comprehensive range of services across the value chain, which includes warehousing, account management, merchandising, channel marketing and e-commerce solutions with a focus on the B2B sector while also addressing B2C clients.
Landscape & Core Challenge
To manage their customers' value chains, Aqipa needs to track, analyze and report on large quantities of data. They rely on SAP HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud to provide their corporate customers with distribution and merchandising services, demand planning and procurement, marketing, warehousing and logistics, e-commerce, and reporting and insights services. They needed to expand from monthly to daily sales and inventory reporting to improve customer communications and strengthen relationships. To accomplish this expansion while reducing IT workload, Aqipa needed to move beyond manual processes to automated and repeatable report broadcasting processes.
Problem: SAP Analytics Cloud Publications lacks extensive report broadcasting capabilities to external stakeholders
Manual creation and distribution of daily reports would create a significant burden on controllers, analysts and IT staff, and create the risk of non-timely reporting to external stakeholders.
Requirements
Enhancing customer reporting and communications processes required:
- Automated email broadcasting of daily, weekly and monthly SAP Analytics Cloud-based turnover reports on sales and inventory to internal and external stakeholders
- Turnover reports must be filtered by a particular date range
- Turnover reports must be filtered to provide recipient-specific information
- Turnover reports must be extracted into Excel with calculated columns and formatting.
- Reports must be saved to the internal network or to an FTP-server
- Report delivery must be timely to service business processes
Barriers
SAP Analytics Cloud Publications limitations:
- Insufficient support for broadcasting to external stakeholders
- Individual and manually created report Bookmarks would create a cumbersome and time-consuming process
- Schedules can timeout, leading to errors
- Schedules are dependent on SAC system scheduling constraints
- Excel not supported; CSV export does not retain formatting
- No filtering on CSV or table export; all data is exported; calculations are not exported
Outcomes
APOS Publisher for Cloud has been deployed by Aqipa, and is effective in providing:
- Timely, automated daily, weekly and monthly turnover report broadcasting to a variety of internal and external stakeholders to support business processes
- Report broadcasts filtered by a particular date range and recipient
- Report details extracted into Excel with calculated columns and formatting
- Reports saved to the internal network and SFTP-server
"APOS Publisher for Cloud enables us to provide stakeholders with timely, customized reports by streamlining and automating the report distribution process for maximum efficiency."
Isabell Schneider, Project Owner, Aqipa GmbH