Every company in the world wants to gain an edge in the consumer market. Data is the current basis for this and every company needs more of it and ways to process it. Ferrara the global name in candy has a motto of “Delight in every bite”, this is accomplished through a joint business and IT team making up to data accurate decisions based on incoming consumer data about preference and taste among others.
SAP stands for systems, applications, and products in data processing, for Ferrara a company called SAP HANA handles the data processing aspect. The main point to remember in this is that the data gathered has to be accurate and processed properly, most consumer-based companies cannot deal with it to the extent required. The IT department, therefore, works with external agencies to handle it in the best possible way. Getting the right data at the right time to the right people is a challenging task for any organization. Applying the analytics platform provided by SAP HANA has allowed Ferrara to reduce the storage footprint by 94 percent when compared directly to traditional platforms.
The first implementation saved the company almost 200,000 USD in the as short a time as 15 weeks. Accurate real-time data has allowed Ferrara to meet customer needs efficiently. They also plan to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to better process this data.
The company is focused on speed at a cultural level, and these investments augment it in all the important ways. The main sources of data include online orders, seasonal sales, weekly sales, customer reviews, social media sentiment, and forum posts, and several others. The data is then stored in the external platform saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware costs. The entire process is extremely streamlined with almost indistinguishable data from several sources that are being processed in real-time with actionable insight provided at every perceived change. Customer support deals with queries from executives in a timely and efficient manner. The level of interactions within the platform is also unprecedent with several people available to quickly clarify doubts as via comments and replies.
Any company that uses an external data analytics service gains a significant edge in the market while reducing a large number of costs. Many such partnerships will be formed in the next few months
