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JUMBO DELIVERS INSIGHT IN BELGIUM WITH SAP S/4HANA EMBEDDED ANALYTICS

Jumbo supermarkets are a leading retailer in the Netherlands, and now they are gaining a foothold in Belgium. Three Belgian branches are now running on SAP S/4HANA, the next-gen ERP system from SAP. Ctac enabled Jumbo to build all the financial and logistical reports they need, without any help from external parties.

Jumbo is a family-owned company with a rich company history, operating in the Netherlands and Belgium. Currently Jumbo has around seven hundred stores, including eight Food Markets, and a successful online order and delivery service via Jumbo.com. The group also operates the Jumbo City convenience store concept, which combines elements of the regular Jumbo stores, Foodmarket and the La Place restaurant chain. In this way, Jumbo aims to make delicious and healthy food easily accessible for everyone.

What the customer wants, needs and expects is paramount in everything Jumbo does. The supermarket chain is committed to continuously surprising and inspiring customers, and providing them with the best shopping experience every day. This unique Jumbo formula is applied in all stores, with a combination of best service, an extensive product ranges, and consistently low prices. Customers can also rely on Jumbo’s 7 Certainties. By always putting the customer first, Jumbo is one of the top rated supermarket chains. Every year, Jumbo welcomes over 10 million customers.

In 2009, Jumbo took over the Super de Boer supermarket chain, followed in 2012 by the larger C1000. At the beginning of 2016, Jumbo took over the La Place food service chain. This was followed in 2018 by the acquisition of part of EMTÉ, and in 2019 Jumbo took over the Agrimarkt regional supermarket chain. In this way, Jumbo has grown from a regional supermarket chain to a leading omnichannel retailer in the Netherlands. The group opened its first store in Belgium at the end of 2019. There are now seventeen Jumbo stores in Belgium.

Standard analytics on board

Three Belgian branches are now running on SAP S/4HANA, SAP’s latest ERP system, which supports more or less all the company’s key processes, in contrast to the Dutch supermarkets, which are still running on SAP ECC, the predecessor of SAP S/4HANA. Due to the high level of customisation, the Belgian branches explicitly opted for a brand-new implementation instead of using a variant of the standard Dutch system.

One important benefit of SAP S/4HANA is the extensive ability to produce real-time analyses, which is a standard feature of the system. These Embedded Analytics capabilities enable users to quickly view all kinds of relevant data and run reports without the need for add-on products from SAP or other suppliers.
 

Brand new reports

For the Dutch branches, Jumbo uses BI software from MicroStrategy to generate reports based on the data in SAP ECC. Ctac helped Jumbo migrate twenty existing reports to SAP S/4HANA. Users of that system now have the same information, with the difference that they no longer need any separate applications to see it. The reports are available directly in the system.

The framework with financial and logistical models that Ctac built for this purpose not only means that new Belgian branches will be able to use the reports, but will also benefit the Dutch locations once Jumbo also makes
the move to S/4HANA in the Netherlands.

Knowledge transfer

Tom van der Molen is an SAP Finance consultant at Jumbo. He is part of Jumbo’s IT organisation. As a consultant, Van der Molen has a lot of contact with business operations. Where possible, he tries to build bridges between Jumbo’s finance professionals and his IT colleagues, to improve processes and solve problems.

Van der Molen was closely involved in setting up the reporting functionality in SAP S/4HANA. “My focus was financial,” he says. “A colleague was responsible for the supply chain reporting aspects.”

The project took less than a year. Ctac used a managed, step-by-step methodology to set up the reports in the new environment. This approach makes as much use as possible of established processes and standards in the system. Knowledge transfer is an important part of this methodology. Van der Molen learned from Ctac how he  could build his own reports using embedded analytics in SAP S/4HANA. Modelling, creating queries, you name it – Van der Molen can now do it all himself.

Easy drilldown

Van der Molen is enthusiastic about the options offered by the embedded analytics capabilities. “Sometimes you  want to be able to drill down into specific numbers in a report in order to view the underlying data. This is easy to do with the embedded analytics in SAP S/4HANA.” Van der Molen’s colleagues are now also discovering these benefits. They have him on speed dial. “I am constantly getting questions and requests,” he says.  “Some things that people want can easily be solved with standard Fiori apps. If it’s a question we can answer with Embedded Analytics, we get to work. We use a standard OTAP process for this. I work on it in a separate development and test environment. Then it goes to the acceptance environment, where my colleagues can test the report using “real” production data.” Once the report has passed all the tests, it goes to the production environment and everyone can use it.

Bringing external knowledge in-house

Van der Molen has learned a lot from Ctac. “The collaboration with Ctac went very well”, he says. “Sometimes companies hoard their knowledge. I never had that feeling with Ctac. I had a good mentor who taught me not only how to develop all kinds of things using standard options, but also how to build certain views myself. He conveyed the subject matter calmly and wanted to explain it clearly. He was really interested in making sure I was also able to do it for myself. As a result, important knowledge that was previously external has now come in-house.”