SAP developed a forecast model with an easy-to-use dashboard using SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) in collaboration with net-new customer Ottogi, a leading food company in Korea.
The dashboard aims to improve Ottogi’s ramen market share forecasting by regional and product segmentation. What’s more, it empowers employees to make better data-driven decisions based on intelligent predictions. Established in 1969, Ottogi is one of the leading food companies in Korea, best known for its curry powder, instant noodles, and other popular products. The company aims to expand its market overseas and become a renowned global brand.
The ramen market is highly competitive in Korea, and accurate market share forecasting is a prerequisite to gain a competitive advantage. That is why Ottogi’s Strategy Analytics team sought to forecast market share with advanced analytics and utilize this data for the company’s marketing and planning.
Applying SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innovation at Ottogi
Following SAP’s human-centered approach to innovation, the SAP project team conducted a remote workshop to gain insights into the pain points and user needs within Ottogi’s existing work processes. Due to COVID-19 constraints, all meetings and user research activities were conducted online. SAP and Ottogi team members virtually shared the real business context, relevant data, and application screens, enabling them to effectively understand and identify the business challenges despite not being able to work in a co-located fashion.
During the workshop, team members discovered that end users were struggling with data preprocessing, which involved consolidating disparate data and standardizing units. Such activities required significant manual work utilizing tools such as MS Excel. Data sharing across stakeholder groups was also cumbersome. Furthermore, the Ottogi project members questioned whether their forecasting accuracy might be improved.
The project team saw this as an opportunity for innovation by improving both the data preprocessing activities and the quality of their forecasting model. In addition, they saw an opportunity to enable all stakeholders to access in real time one source of data using SAP Analytics Cloud.
The project team set the following goals:
- Improve the market share forecast accuracy and enable more granular segmentation of market share data
- Reduce the time and effort during data preprocessing to increase employee productivity
- Enhance the existing workflow to make real-time sharing of market share forecasts easier across organizations, such as the marketing team, and to enable data-driven decision making
Leveraging SAP BTP to Elevate the Forecasting Experience
The Ottogi and SAP project team proposed a new forecasting model built on SAP HANA Cloud predictive analytics library to increase forecast accuracy. The model allows for increased segmentation compared to the process in the past. A new dashboard now provides the company with more accurate market share forecasting and shortens the forecast cycles from monthly to weekly. The forecast is segmented by geographic region, product category, and product brand, comprising 152 different values that help Ottogi gain in-depth insights into its current market share on a more granular level. The tool provides these values in real time to the marketing and analytics teams.
“Choosing SAP as an innovation partner was a crucial first step for Ottogi toward becoming an intelligent enterprise,” shared Junyoung Chang, industry account executive for SAP P&T Sales in Korea. “The successful outcome of this project proves the high potential of SAP Business Technology Platform to drive business innovation and will significantly enhance customer success.”
The project resulted in a new forecasting environment at Ottogi, which enabled marketing and sales teams to create their strategies using weekly market share analyses. The forecasts provided stronger segmentation than in the past, enabling more sophisticated and strategic decision making based on reliable data.
“We needed analytics that could help put Ottogi ahead of the competition,” said Chang-kyu, Lee, lead of the Corporate Strategy Analytics team at Ottogi. “SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud empower our employees to make better, data-driven decisions based on intelligent predictions.”
Having started with the ramen market share analysis topic, the net-new customer now intends to extend the coverage to other products within its portfolio. The improvement to market share forecasting is changing the way Ottogi makes decisions. The company relies on a more accurate and intelligent analytical foundation now, paving the way for more to come.
