For more than 55 years, elho has been supplying plastic flower pots. Today, the family-owned company’s products can be found on store shelves in more than 75 countries. This makes elho the market leader in Europe. The company operates in an environmentally friendly and socially responsible manner. For example, 95 percent of the products elho manufactures are made from recycled plastic. Eventually, every product bearing the elho logo will be made entirely from recycled plastic. Furthermore, elho’s products are manufactured in the Netherlands rather than in Asia, which is much more sustainable. The company uses electricity generated by elho’s own wind turbine.
For years, elho has been using SAP ECC, the gold standard in ERP for many manufacturing companies. “When we first started using SAP, it was actually too big for us. Now, it forms the backbone of our organization,” says CFO Floris Alders. “Demand planning, procurement, inventory, order intake, invoicing, the entire financial organization—almost everything happens in SAP at our company.” All the data that Alders and his colleagues need to make decisions and steer the company is stored in the ERP system. “That data is incredibly important to us—for example, for creating production plans or optimizing our product range,” explains Alders. “We believe we can do much more with our data. We want to evolve into a truly data-driven company.”
With Microsoft Power BI, we have a solid foundation for a data-driven future.
Floris Alders, CFO of Elho
A modern system
To report on all the data in SAP, elho initially used SAP BusinessObjects. “That solution was quite static. We were working with over 180 active reports. Keeping all those reports up and running was becoming increasingly difficult,” said Alders. “We felt like we’d lost control. The reporting environment felt like a black box. For some of the data in the system, we didn’t even know the source anymore. Making a quick adjustment or building a new report on the fly was difficult. We needed a system that was up to date.” Partly on the advice of Ensior, elho chose Microsoft Power BI.
Microsoft Power BI is an advanced tool for creating, viewing, and sharing reports and dashboards. The software is exceptionally user-friendly and accessible. Power BI also offers a wide range of practical self-service capabilities, giving individual users much more control over their reports. “Alistar set up a replication mechanism that copies all key data from SAP to a separate SQL server,” explains David de Keijzer, BI Consultant at Alistar. He was closely involved in the elho project. “The information from SAP—more than 4,500 different objects—is ready for use in the Power BI reports and dashboards. We then rebuilt the majority of elho’s more than 180 existing reports in Power BI. Users can now log in to a portal to view their own reports.”
Ready for the Future
“We chose Alistar because we’ve been working together for years. They knew us inside and out,” said elho’s CFO Floris Alders. “That allowed Alistar to get off to a flying start.” The benefits of the new reporting environment are numerous. The new environment is fast, stable, and highly reliable. “For example, we can now run margin reports at the customer or product level much more easily. Delivery rates are also always transparent. We can see exactly to what extent we’ve delivered our orders ‘on-time, in-full.’ With Microsoft Power BI, we have a solid foundation for a data-driven future.”
