SAP Perfect Lap Issue 02
McLaren recognised in the mid-90s it needed to
integrate its business systems to provide cross-group
consistency (with HR and time-management software,
for example) and that process is now taking dramatic
leaps forward with McLaren’s adoption of SAP’s HANA
platform and associated HEC support.
HANA is SAP’s acronym for High-performance
ANalytic Appliance and its implementation is,
according to McLaren Group’s Head of Business
Systems Paul Wetton, nothing short of “revolutionary”.
“The revolution with HANA,” Wetton
says, “is that businesses are made
to operate in real time. Historically
there has always been a separation
of data currency from the real time
nature of a business, so the data
being interpreted and relied on by
decision-makers can be a day, a
week, a month or more out of date.
“HANA, though, brings a real-time dynamic. Having,
for example, Enterprise Resource Planning in real
time, brings everything into real time and this is new.”
The value of this info-immediacy can be immense
to a business. Taking the example of parts delivery
into McLaren Automotive, Wetton explains that
HANA would allow McLaren to spot a supply-chain
blip immediately, thus enabling it to react swiftly to
prevent any damage creeping into the business. With
traditional reports-based analysis, problems of this
kind would take many weeks to identify, by which time,
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of course, their effect would already have fed into the
manufacturing process. Thus any traditional report,
when delivered, would only allow, at best, mitigation of
damage already done, or of costs already incurred.
“SAP is being implemented for McLaren Automotive
as we speak,” Wetton explains, “which means we’ll
be able to deliver management reports that are just
a few milliseconds old, rather than being a week or
a month out of date. HANA will run MRP [Materials
Resource and Planning] for Automotive, allowing its
management team to make decisions based on realtime information.”
He likens the benefits of instantaneous analytics to
driving a car with live Sat-Nav updates. “Instead of
getting snarled up in congestion,” Wetton says, “you’re
able to identify those problems ahead of time and
take avoiding action. That’s a tremendous competitive
advantage in a reports-based industry when your rivals
are relying on far less current data.”
A cornerstone of HANA