Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Shorter financial planning cycle

Reduced from 21 to 14 days

Shorter commercial planning cycle

Decreased from 13 to 8 days

Shorter dynamic plan calculation

Accelerated from 10 hours to 3 hours

Shorter data transfer to DWH

Cut from 1 day to 2 hours

Key Objectives

Why CRMT & CCH Tagetik

Merkur selected CRMT & CCH Tagetik for several reasons that are: CRMT’s long-term partnership with Tagetik and deep industry knowledge sets it apart and CCH Tagetik’s solution excels due to its:

• Integrated platform for financial and operational planning, budgeting, and reporting.
• User-friendly interface for easy model creation and modification.
• Advanced planning capabilities including what-if analysis and scenario planning.
• Scalability for enterprise-level planning and reporting.

CCH Tagetik transformed Merkur’s landscape: swift planning, real-time scenario assessment, independent control, and fortified decision support. Concurrent reporting and expedited data provisioning bolstered organisational responsiveness.

Boris Moškotelec, Head of Controlling at Merkur

Implementation

In response to these challenges and objectives, CRMT collaborated closely with Merkur to tailor a solution that leveraged the capabilities of the CCH Tagetik platform.

Benefits for Merkur

Benefits for Merkur from implementing the CCH Tagetik solution include:

Improved Responsiveness in Managing Changes:
The CCH Tagetik solution allowed Merkur to quickly update statement models and adapt planning and reporting structures in response to changes in the business model. With just a few clicks, recalculating any report or plan becomes effortless when new data emerges or modifications occur at the source. This improved their ability to respond to dynamic business conditions.

Integration of Plans:
The CCH Tagetik solution seamlessly integrated the results of the commercial plan into the financial planning process. This integration streamlined the planning process and ensured consistency between different aspects of planning.

Versioning with Scenarios:
Merkur could create multiple versions of dynamic commercial and financial plans with the CCH Tagetik solution. This enabled them to explore various scenarios and make manual adjustments at higher levels, while also allowing for automatic in-depth recalculation at lower levels.

Shortened Duration of Processes:
The implementation of the CCH Tagetik solution led to significant time savings. The transfer process of the commercial plan to the financial plan was automated, reducing the time required to complete the process to a maximum of 30 minutes. Additionally, the dynamic plan calculation at lower planning levels was reduced from overnight to less than an hour.

Independence from IT Department:
Merkur’s controlling department, responsible for the annual planning process, gained independence from the IT department for managing and transferring plans to the data warehouse. This enhanced autonomy streamlined the planning workflow.

Streamlined Reporting:
Introducing categories into the statement model using the CCH Tagetik solution simplified reporting. This allowed for adjustments to be made for various effects, such as Covid-19 or IFRS16, resulting in more accurate and informative reporting.

Efficient Data Transfer:
The CCH Tagetik solution made the process of exporting plans to the data warehouse (DWH) more efficient. The entire plan transfer was completed in less than 3 hours, reducing the time required for this step in the planning process.

Enhanced Data Accuracy and Reliability:
Through automated processes, monthly reports and data achieve higher accuracy, minimizing the need for verification and reducing work hours. This automation significantly improves data reliability.

Time Savings for Key Processes:
Implementation of the solution translates to saved time, which can be redirected towards critical tasks like forecasting and generating multiple plan versions. This newfound efficiency adds substantial value to the organization’s operations.

User-Friendly Interface and Remarkable Performance:
The comprehensive CCH Tagetik solution offers extensive customization options and flexibility, while remaining easy to use for the average user. Operating through Excel, familiar to most users, accelerates the learning curve. Proper training enables quick independence, alongside the platform’s capacity for versatile report/process modeling and seamless model upgrades.

Unified Data Repository:
Information from diverse sectors, such as finance and commercial planning, is consolidated in a single accessible platform. Comparisons between data sets are effortless, eliminating the need for offline Excel files, document systems, and email-based change exchanges.

Enhanced Security and User Restrictions:
Users can be restricted across dimensions, ensuring that only authorized individuals can access/edit data, bolstering security measures.

Comprehensive Auditing:
The inclusion of an audit log is exceptionally crucial. Unlike scattered Excel files, Tagetik’s audit log records all changes—user logins, data alterations, job executions—providing precise timestamps down to milliseconds.

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Naslov projekta: INTEGRALNO ALU LIGHT OHIŠJE ZA E-MOBILNOST 5.0

Akronim projekta: IALO 5.0

Projekt financira Evropska Unija – NextGenerationEU. Naložba je del ukrepov načrta, ki se financira iz mehanizma Načrt za okrevanje in odpornost (NOO).

Cilj projekta je razvoj tehnologije in proces za inovativen izdelek, ki bo digitalno podprt in namenjen trajnostni mobilnosti prihodnosti. Bistvo projekta je razvoj tehnologije tornega varjenja sestavov iz litih in gnetnih aluminijevih zlitin, ki nam bo pri konkretnem izdelku integralnega ohišja elektronike za e-avtomobile omogočilo nadomestitev dveh ulitih stranskih pokrovov s hladno preoblikovanimi pokrovi. Zastavljeni RRI projekt naslavlja razvoj procesa in izdelka, ki vključuje tehnologije z nizkim ogljičnim odtisom, materiale, ki so 100% reciklirani in reciklabilni in je namenjen trajnostni e-mobilnosti. V RRI projektu bomo raziskovali možnosti povečanja energetske in snovne produktivnosti z razvojem digitalnih orodij, ki bodo podpora proizvodnim procesom. Digitalno podprt proces bo omogočil hitrejše prilagajanje proizvodnje in s tem boljšo kakovost končnega izdelka ter procesno sledljivost.

Vrednost projekta: 719.970 EUR

Sofinanciranje: 299.000 EUR

Vodilni partner: LTH Castings d.o.o.

Obdobje izvajanja: 1. 11. 2023 do 31. 10. 2025

Partnerja: Niko d.o.o. in CRMT d.o.o.

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As the largest Slovenian vertically integrated metallurgical group with high value-added products, they now hold the leading market positions in European and global niche steel markets. They managed to so, with products such as stainless steel, toolbar steel, special steel quarto plates, and alloy tool steels. They saw success by upgrading the program of steel semi-finished products with the finishing and production of finished metal products. Now ranking among the ten largest manufacturers of industrial knives in the world. The SIJ Group also produces rollers, welding materials, and is very active in the field of mechanical engineering.

Challenge: Eliminating bottlenecks and facilitating management and maintenance processes

The SIJ Group had already used Oracle Business Intelligence as a Business Intelligence solution. The tool didn’t meet all their requirements, so they were looking for a more flexible platform with comprehensive mobile functionalities.  “We were looking for a solution to offer our users flexible self-service analytics on their mobile devices as well”, recalls Emir Mustafić, Senior Development Engineer and Coordinator of the BI Team at SIJ Group. The group was evaluating alternative solutions to improve the quality of work for employees and administrators,  including the MicroStrategy platform. “With the complete re-organization of the Business Intelligence environment of the SIJ Group, we wanted to implement a platform to simplify and unify management, be responsive, and infrastructure-independent. In addition to the required capabilities, we also wanted the best connectivity with back-end systems, rich functionality, and mobile BI capability”, said Mustafić, summarizing the requirements for the new BI environment.

Solution: Detailed insight into customers and business operations

The SIJ Group did not want to purchase an unproven solution, so they evaluated several best practices from various industries. “Although we came across the MicroStrategy solution only by chance, we looked at it in more detail as the provider is working with an official partner for sales and support in Slovenia. We were more than pleasantly surprised by it, so we used it in the complete re-organization of our BI environment”, explains Mustafić.

Working with Slovenian MicroStrategy partner CRMT d.o.o., the SIJ Group implemented the MicroStrategy platform. The implementation was done as an internal IT project. Around 180 existing dashboards which were located on the former BI platform were transferred to the new MicroStrategy platform. It only took six months from the start of the project to its general deployment with SIJ’s business users.

In addition to the facilitated administration and deeper insight into business data there are other benefits as well. Users and employees appreciate the possibility of using BI tools on modern mobile devices, making work much easier and faster.

The cost of maintenance have reduced by 73 percent.

Emir Mustafić

They greatly raised their field of analytics, with its open architecture and connectivity with external systems and associated data sources. “Today, we know our own business, trends, needs and requirements of customers and the market much better. And we respond to them accordingly”, explains Mustafić.

Results: Using MicroStrategy for all analytical tasks

CRMT had thoroughly redesigned and upgraded the analytical environment of the SIJ Group. Now using MicroStrategy solutions throughout the new BI environment.

The SIJ Group uses the MicroStrategy as a single platform for all analytical tasks and purposes. Employees are now working significantly more efficiently and faster. At the same time, the number of BI and Analytics users has expanded by as much as 42 percent. Both administrators (IT department) and owners welcomed the new, centralized analytics platform with open arms, since the cost of maintenance have reduced by 73 percent. Among the bigger benefits is also a significantly lower amount of support and help tickets from business users.

The IT department is now less busy with maintaining the BI and Analytics environment, therefore we shifted more focus on its development. We have reduced the tasks related to the development cycle of business intelligence by around 33 percent.

Emir Mustafić

Conclusion: Expanding the deployment and adding interactivity

The new analytical environment is certainly ready for future challenges in the field of data preparation and processing. Adding a new data source, or even migrating to a new platform if such a business need arises, is greatly simplified.

We also want to take advantage of all features of the new platform, so we are already working on the implementation of interactivity, to enable advanced communication and visualisation of reports for business users.

Emir Mustafić

In the future, the SIJ Group plans to make the implemented reports from the BI environment available to users of non-BI solutions, especially on the internal portal based on the Microsoft SharePoint solution. “We also want to take advantage of all features of the new platform, so we are already working on the implementation of interactivity, to enable advanced communication and visualization of reports for business users. We want to perform queries by voice or using Amazon Alexa’s digital assistant. We want to create an analytical environment that will be fully tailored to the group and its users”, Mustafić revealed some of the development plans.

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Challenge – processing more than a billion records

Existing analytical systems and applications that were used by the Lottery of Slovenia were outdated and needed renewal. They decided to thoroughly revise the analytical environment, as employees wanted to work with new technologies and applications. Changing the transactional system also contributed to a partial renovation of IT infrastructure and modernization of architecture in their headquarters. The database of the Lottery of Slovenia already consists of more than a billion records.

Solution – Exasol proves itself in the most demanding environments

The change of the transaction system caused many changes in the analytical environment, and the renovation was entrusted to a specialized analytical solutions provider CRMT. In addition to the modernization of the data warehouse and the inclusion of changed data sources, the Lottery of Slovenia also changed manual procedures for gathering and processing data. They have modernized its data warehouse in accordance with the latest guidelines in the field of storage modeling, data retrieval, processing and storage (ETL). Processes for the preparation of reports and analysis were changed as well. The classical relational base was replaced by the Exasol analytical base which excels on the speed front.

CRMT designed and implemented new processes on the open-source integration platform Talend, the benefits of which are extremely fast and visually supported development, automatic processes documentation, and access to over 900 standard connectors for different sources and data sinks. At the same time, the Lottery of Slovenia modernized and consolidated the existing reporting system on the MicroStrategy BI platform coupled with the most advanced options for dashboards, reports creation and distribution, ad-hoc analysis, and introduced self-service analysis and distribution of reports. The new analytical environment of the company was built in two phases, with each phase lasting 3 months.

Results – more than 100 times faster reports creation

CRMT provided the analytical environment with exceptional robustness of data-related procedures (ETL), which completely eliminated the need for manual corrections of data. The analytical system automatically generates the target database code at the exact place where it is executed. Time savings in data preparation are exceptional, as is the processing itself. The specialized analytical database Exasol processes more than one billion records more than 100 times faster than the old analytical environment did. The system automatically ensures optimal operation and consequently makes work for the administrator less demanding. Consolidation and optimization of reporting have made it possible to reduce the number of reports. The company is now preparing reports faster and these are also more transparent as one interactive dashboard can replace 20 separate reports.

Innovative since 2004 – the analytical system carries out reports and analysis

Because commercial applications were not as widely available as today the Lottery of Slovenia developed its own system in 2004. CRMT experts recommended that the company transfers most of their reports, to the analytical environment. This significantly reduced the cost of the transaction system architecture since the creation of reports (programming) also amounts to most of the development costs. At the same time, both areas have to be coordinated in the development and simultaneously transferred into the production environment. The company prefers this way of creating reports, since new reports are developed significantly faster than in transactional systems. The company had maintained the same concept in the current upgraded applications as well as the analytical system. Today, all reports and analysis, with the exception of operational reporting, are derived from the new analytical system.

Conclusion – ready for the future

The new analytical environment is certainly prepared for future challenges in the field of data preparation and processing. Adding a new data source or even migration to a new platform, if such needs occur.

“The change of the analytical environment brought Lottery of Slovenia a significant improvement in the speed of the flexibility of ETL procedures, the raw speed of Exasol and new functionalities of the MicroStrategy platform. Now it has an analytical environment that is definitely ready for the future”, added Slavko Kastelic, director of sales and marketing at CRMT.

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The Mladinska Knjiga Group is the largest publishing group in South-Eastern Europe, with a rich tradition stretching back more than 70 years. They are present in five countries and employ 900 people.

Challenge

The company set out to deploy a data warehouse and introduce business analytics into its business in 2010. Over recent years, the amount of data the company has been processing has increased dramatically so MKZ’s previous analytical solution just could not cope with the growth in demand.

The company went out into the market to find a more innovative solution. With its partner CRMT, the company examined various options and chose to test in-memory analytic solutions from five different technology providers.

MKZ studied the products available on the market, calling on an experienced database administrator for his input. He immediately recommended the EXASOL analytic database engine, noting that it would significantly reduce DBA overhead as the database is self-optimizing and automatically performs a large number of administration tasks itself.

During testing EXASOL they discovered these major benefits:

• data processing took just two seconds (with the previous solution, it took them an hour and fifteen minutes),
• the solution requires only ten percent of the data volume to be kept in memory.

Solution

When they deployed the Exasol database in 2017, the company’s IT department had to do very little to make it perform. CRMT customized their ETL and syntax, which was a one-off task, and then they could start to see distinct advantages with the system.

Also, their business end-users suddenly had much faster reporting and data visualizations, with EXASOL delivering information to their MicroStrategy BI platform in a fraction of the time when compared to the previous solution.

All co-workers who are responsible for taking important business decisions were given full access to the new system. This was important because business analytics in Mladinska Knjiga Založba are being deployed across an increasing number of departments and employees.

Benefits

Mladinska Knjiga Založba appreciates the following characteristics of the Exasol:

• much higher quality of service for a comparable price,
• ease of use,
• the incredible speed of data processing

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Telekom Slovenije case study is describing the use of Exasol as a solution to provide most complex analytics.

Telekom Slovenije is a comprehensive communications service provider in Slovenia. It is recognised as the leader in the introduction and connection of new generations of mobile and fixed communication services, system integration and cloud services and multimedia content.

The Telekom Slovenije Group is one of the leading providers of communication services in the region of South-East Europe. In addition to the national telecommunication operator in Slovenia, it also operates through its subsidiaries on the markets of Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. The Group’s activities include fixed and mobile communications services, digital content and services, multimedia services and digital advertising, system integration and cloud computing services, construction and maintenance of telecommunications networks, and conservation of natural and cultural heritage in the Sečovlje Saltpans Regional Park. It operates the most reliable and high-quality telecommunications network in Slovenia, as well as one of the most complex backbone networks in the region of SE Europe.

Challenge

Telekom Slovenije had been using analytical solutions for more than a decade. New data sources and demands from business users proved challenging for the existing analytics environment. The quantity and speed of data were simply too large and too fast to be handled with existing tools and solutions. “Our biggest challenge was the speed of carrying out queries over large data volumes and the discontinuation of the data intelligence department which dealt with the analysis of more complex data”, remembered Borut Rožac, software engineer at Telekom Slovenije.

The company decided on centralized processing of various data derived from its numerous services. As analytics were handled by business intelligence department new challenges arose from the side of data scientists which wanted to perform highly demanding queries on large data sets. “Our former analytical solutions simply could not handle complex queries over huge amounts of data – we had over a billion and a half lines of data connected to a large number of other data sources”, said Rožac.

Solution

In 2017 Telekom Slovenije decided to thoroughly renew its analytics infrastructure. A goal was to find and implement a scalable and therefore future-proof solution. The IT department and BI business unit set out the use case for some comparative analytical solutions. The aim was to review different analytical solutions against each other on the same virtualised hardware platform and faced them with one billion lines of data and complex queries.

We also compared the ability to use analytical tools like Python and R directly on the database. We checked the support for different programming languages, and the possibility of integrating the database through the ORM-functionality. Finally, we compared the costs aspects: cost of licenses, implementation and maintenance, coupled with the required level of system administration.

We were blown away by the exceptional performance and responsiveness of Exasol. And this was the only database we have worked with that required virtually no administration once it was set up.

Borut Rožac

In the end there was one clear winner: Exasol in-memory database.

Benefits

Exasol in-memory database environment is now used by Telekom Slovenije for advanced analytics and machine learning tasks. “We were blown away by the exceptional performance and responsiveness of Exasol. This was the only database we have worked with, that required virtually no administration once it was set up”, said Rožac.

Exasol database enabled us to efficiently process vast amounts of data from different sources which simply hasn’t been possible of viable before.

Borut Rožac

The Exasol analytical database more than fulfilled the expectations regarding the speed of advanced querying. This was demonstrated with by far the fastest generation of table extracts for analytical software Tableau that is used by data scientists and business users at Telekom Slovenije and derives insights that are presented via personalized dashboards.

“Exasol database enabled us to efficiently process vast amounts of data from different sources which simply hasn’t been possible of viable before,” concluded Rožac.

Key benefits:

• Performance
• Ease of use
• Compatibility
• Value

Implementation

The implementation of Exasol in-memory database started early in 2017. With the help of CRMT experts Telekom Slovenije implemented the solution in one single day. Initial load of one billion records was finished within the week though it started data collection from the “flat” files. CRMT also carried successful integration of Exasol with our big data environment. They integrated also other applications – Tableau, Phython and R what enabled Telekom Slovenije to take maximum advantage of their current infrastructure.

“Everything went smooth, the implementation was very easy and quick and the migration from the virtual environment to the physical machine, used in production was equally fast”, Rožac noted.

Conclusion

Today Telekom Slovenije is using Exasol in-memory database as its main platform for the independent work of data scientists. Business users enjoy excellent system responsiveness. System administrators praise its scalability and ease of integration with other existing hardware and software solutions and data sources.

With clear monetization of data in sight, the company plans to expand the use of Exasol throughout the companies in Telekom Slovenije Group.

You can also watch the presentation of Borut Rožac, Telekom Slovenije on Exasol Xperience 2018

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