Big Lots! Simplifies Sales Audits by Associating POS Receipts Directly with its SAP Financials Deepa Balani, Big Lots! Manish Garg, Big Lots! Dr.

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2 Big Lots! Simplifies Sales Audits by Associating POS Receipts Directly with its SAP Financials Deepa Balani, Big Lots! Manish Garg, Big Lots! Dr. Werner Hopf, Dolphin SESSION CODE: RL1554

3 LEARNING POINTS Big data volumes from POS-DM put pressure on resources which can be alleviated with a data volume management strategy Retailers can use archiving to reduce the cost and complexity of systems and enable quick reporting on business-critical data Financial audits can be simplified by associating POS-DM data with financial transactions in SAP systems

4 AGENDA About Big Lots! IS-Retail & Need for a Data Volume Management Strategy Simplifying the Sales Tax Audit Process Wrap Up

5 Big Lots Overview Over $5 billion in annual revenue Approximately 1,460 stores in 48 states 5 distribution centers

6 Big Lots Overview 7 major lines of business Food, Consumables, Seasonal, Soft Home, Hard Home, Electronics & Accessories, Furniture & Home Décor Mix of Closeouts, In-and- Outs, and Replenishables

7 Big Lots Overview Approximately 300K articles 25,000 active at any time Assortments vary by store Mix of Imported & Domestic Retail Method of Accounting (RMA) used for inventory valuation and gross margin calculation

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9 Teaming with Dolphin Focus: SAP Customers Only Proven solutions for the SAP customer leveraging SAP technology and certified by SAP Stature: 1/3 of all Fortune 100 TM companies running SAP are Dolphin customers Stability: Employee owned; private; independent of outside stakeholders; organic growth; Longevity: Established in 1995 Global Solutions : Hundreds of scalable, flexible and cost effective deployments 9

10 Why SAP & IS-Retail 2007 Big Lots spends several months evaluating available solutions SAP with IS- Retail was selected based on its functionality and its fit with our strategic plan

11 M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 M10 M11 M12 Terabytes Business Challenge: Rapid Data Growth Data collected from approximately 1,460 retail stores Integration of POS-DM resulted in lots of new data Data growing at a rate 2-3x faster than expected Growing rate was estimated to be TB of data in a single year Monthly Data Growth Actual Adding hardware or storage was not enough Projection

12 Business Challenge: Improve Performance Large data volumes slowed critical sales reports Sales data from POS-DM was decoupled from SAP Long, complex process to respond to Sales Audits Busy retail periods left small windows to improve systems

13 AGENDA About Big Lots! IS-Retail and Need for a Data Volume Management Strategy Simplifying the Sales Tax Audit Process Wrap Up

14 IS-Retail Data Capture Data captured at Point of Sale (POS):

15 IS-Retail Sample Data Growth Customers per store/day 1,000 Articles per customer 5 POS records per article 3 Number of stores 1,000 Record size per transaction (KB) 3.5 Retention period 7 years (days) 2,555 Uncompressed data volume > 127 TB * * Sample data volume provided by Dolphin; not specific to any retailer

16 IS-Retail Architecture SAP BW POS Transactions SAP ECC IDOC MM SD FI

17 Data Volume Management Strategy Minimize Total Cost of Ownership Keep online DB small by moving data to archive storage Control Data Volume Growth Improve performance with short online residence period Fast & Efficient Processes User-friendly archiving tools eliminate user resistance Seamless Access Visibility Performance 17

18 Seamless Access to Archived Data With PBS: Complete view of all PO related documents Without PBS: Unable to access archived information ALL the data users need in one place 18

19 Phased Approach to DVM 1. Control Growth Immediately improve performance by archiving static and business complete data Control data volume growth over time 2. Improve Performance Enforce data retention policies and comply with fiscal and legal requirements Provide fast, flexible access to archived sales and tax data

20 DVM Analysis for IS-Retail Table Size SAP Limitations Business Viewpoint Space Constraints IS-Retail Considerations: Sales Tax Audit Must tie POS Receipt data back to FI data in SAP Highly complex, manual process Involves multiple SAP modules, transactions, and documents

21 IS-Retail Architecture SAP BW POS Transactions SAP ECC IDOC MM SD FI Archive + Nearline

22 Lowering the Cost of Big Data in Retail Data Avoidance & Compression from Archive: 97% Query Results after Archive to Nearline: Transaction details by receipt: < 5 s POS transactions aggregated in ERP posting: < 5 s Total sales values per article day, and store: < 10 s

23 Data Growth & Archiving Impact 6/12: Data volume is greater than anticipated 1/13: Initial BI archiving begins. Slows rate of data growth 2/12: SAP Go Live 7/14: ECC archiving begins. Data growth slows across both systems

24 Database Growth Trend Database growth has been consistent since archiving

25 Archiving Compression 90% compression from initial archiving Additional 7% compression came from move to nearline

26 AGENDA About Big Lots! IS-Retail and Need for a Data Volume Management Strategy Simplifying the Sales Audit Process Wrap Up

27 Sales Audit Problem How can auditors trace sales information from a receipt through SAP? SAP BW POS Transactions SAP ECC IDOC MM SD FI

28 Manual Tracking of a Sales Receipt BW system ECC system 1. Get aggregate number from POS-DM 2. Search for number in /POSDW/ AGGPRD table 3. Get IDOC number from /POSDW/ AGGPRD table 7. View billing document of interest to auditor 6. View information the store of interest 5. Search for related transaction in wper 4. Search for IDOC in ZPOS_IDOC_ LOG

29 Complex Sales Audit with Online Data SAP BW POS Transactions SAP ECC IDOC MM SD FI 1. Aggregate Number 2. Search Number 3. IDOC number 4. Search IDOC 5. Search for transaction 6. View store info 7. View Billing Seven Manual Steps with Online Data

30 Simplify Sales Audit with Archive SAP BW POS Transactions SAP ECC IDOC MM SD FI Archive + Nearline 1. Sales Audit Reconciliation Report One Report Displays Required Data from Archive

31 Simplify Sales Audit with Archive SAP BW POS-DM Write-optimized Data Store Object 1. Daily process copies relevant data into ECC SAP ECC Sales & Dist. Aggregated data including POS-DM Archive + Nearline 2. Daily archive of data to nearline 1. Sales Audit Reconciliation Report 3. Combined data available in Sales Audit Report

32 Simplifying Sales Audit Trace POS Receipt by: Transaction number Retail Location Date

33 Simplifying Sales Audit For each receipt, view: Article Sales Value Tax Amount Discount

34 Standard DVM Implementation: Nearline SAP ERP Applications SAP Database ZARIX SAP IQ ZARIX SAP IQ license SAP ADK Data Archiving ADK Implementation Considerations: Transparent access Secure, low-cost retention Process complexity

35 Enhanced DVM Implementation: Nearline Extends Standard Solution with: SAP ERP Applications SAP Database ZARIX Cache SAP IQ Index SAP IQ license SAP SAP ADK + ADK Retrieval + Data Archiving + Automation Automation Long-term retention Transparent access Automation Improved performance ADK Index ArchiveLink WebDAV Compliant Storage On premise + Cloud ADK

36 AGENDA About Big Lots! Need for a Data Volume Management Strategy Simplifying the Financial Audit Process Wrap Up

37 Results 97% reduction of data on nearline storage Reduced time to complete a sales queries to 5-10 seconds Improved retention and tax reporting capabilities Improved security for customer and credit card data Improved productivity with automated archiving and faster system performance

38 RETURN ON INVESTMENT Reduced time to respond to audit requests from 2 weeks to 1 day Reduced data growth rate by 90% Improved sales reporting performance by 200%

39 BEST PRACTICES Easier to incorporate archiving requirements early on in project, instead of after data growth becomes an issue Implement a comprehensive data volume management strategy for maximum ROI: Archiving to reduce data growth High performance nearline storage for critical business reporting requirements Leverage archived data in innovative reports and analysis

40 KEY LEARNINGS Financial audits can be simplified by associating POS-DM data with financial transactions in SAP systems Big data volumes from POS-DM put pressure on resources which can be alleviated with a data volume management strategy Retailers can use archiving to reduce the cost and complexity of systems and enable quick reporting on business-critical data

41 STAY INFORMED Follow the ASUGNews team: Tom Chris Craig

42 THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING Please provide feedback on this session by completing a short survey via the event mobile application. SESSION CODE: : RL1554 For ongoing education on this area of focus, visit