A laser-sharp focus on data
Eye-care company Alcon is dedicated to helping people across the world “see brilliantly.” With the SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud solutions, it can now visualize and analyze vast amounts of data from multiple sources in real time. This informs smart, speedy decisions that let it meet customer needs and patient demands effectively and swiftly.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Healthcare | Fort Worth, Texas | >25,000 employees |
Director of Digital ERP Transformation, Alcon Vision LLC
Scanning complex data in real time
Through its eye-care devices and surgical and vision-care businesses, Alcon Vision LLC has been helping improve people’s lives for more than 75 years. The largest eye-care device company in the world, Alcon is present in more than 50 countries, with patients in around 140 countries. The company’s long history of industry firsts includes a revolutionary eye-drop dispenser introduced in the 1950s and a portable virtual reality tool developed in recent years to train eye surgeons. Alcon also runs an extensive corporate social responsibility program, including outreach with local schools to provide free vision tests and teach children about eye health.
With customers from teenage contact lens users to patients with cataracts, Alcon deals with the spectrum of optical healthcare professionals, and many of its products are prescribed rather than off the shelf. It works in a highly regulated environment, reporting to the Food and Drug Administration in the United States. All products require robust batch management, meaning the company produces high volumes of “batch genealogy” data as items progress from component to semifinished product to finished product. As Udayakanth Kuppa, Alcon’s director of digital ERP transformation, explains, “It’s vital to carefully collect and manage this data to inform effective operational decisions on matters such as batch release, hold, recall, or repurpose. And analyzing this batch data can involve scanning through billions of records of historical information that may need to be retained for up to 10 years.”
Against this complex backdrop, conducting analytics was a highly manual process involving fetching data from multiple systems and manipulating it across different spreadsheets. This hampered both data accuracy and responsiveness to events such as supply chain disruption. To gain access to trusted data across billions of records at speed and improve operational efficiency, Alcon needed to enable real-time reporting.
Seeing clearly with real-time analytics
Alcon already had an extensive ecosystem of SAP solutions, including the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) application and SAP Ariba solutions. The natural choice for its new data and analytics system was to integrate SAP Datasphere to maximize the value of its enterprise data. SAP Datasphere would help Alcon deploy a business data fabric architecture and aggregate data in real time from both SAP software and third-party sources. And the company would be able to smoothly replicate this data to the business layer and create intuitive reports and dashboards using the SAP Analytics Cloud solution.
The company had already tested some third-party systems but found the lead time for replicating data was too high for real-time analytics.
Having implemented SAP Datasphere, Alcon integrated it with SAP Ariba solutions to enable robust spend analytics and provide a more insightful view into its overall spend management. It knew SAP Datasphere would facilitate a range of other use cases, including in supply chain management and manufacturing. For example, the solution could help reduce risk by enabling Alcon to ship products in quarantine or quality-inspection mode and release them to the supply chain with greater confidence. Integrating SAP Datasphere with SAP Ariba solutions would also enhance Alcon’s procurement and supply chain visibility.
Viewing disparate data sources through a single lens
Thanks to SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud, Alcon’s business users can now perform real-time analytics in a few clicks. They can intuitively access and visualize data from multiple sources and make batch-release decisions quickly and efficiently. Equipped with reliable, real-time data, Alcon can take informed decisions, helping it react swiftly in the unlikely event of a batch recall, for instance.
A major advantage of the new system is the ability to extract information from billions of records in real time, reducing, in Kuppa’s words, “the humongous effort required for analyzing and presenting the data.”
A second advantage is reduced data-aggregation effort. Kuppa explains, “The more you aggregate data, the more you lose the business context. When data flows from our transaction system into SAP Datasphere, we retain that context while addressing our business use cases and any challenges that arise.” Kuppa cites the elimination of multiple intermediate data-replication processes as a third key benefit.
SAP Datasphere also helps the company reduce total cost of ownership. According to Kuppa, “We can use the new system to innovate many different use cases, from improving inventory and supply chain visibility to managing supply chain disruption. And we can syndicate and federate the data in real time to other systems, which is a much more efficient approach than before. SAP Datasphere has very good interoperability with other data lakes, making syndication and federation much easier.”
Kuppa adds, “Feedback from the business has been excellent. They’re very happy that a lot of things they were doing manually are automated. This gives us greater operational efficiency and lets us react to supply chain disruptions much faster than before. Business users can quickly understand the nature of the impact and what exactly is impacted. Plus, rather than spending days, weeks, or even months ploughing through spreadsheets and crunching data, they can divert that manual effort into higher-value, more-productive work.”
Looking to intelligent technology to innovate for customers
Alcon now intends to develop further use cases for its new data and analytics system to derive even greater value from real-time data. It intends to expand predictive and prescriptive analytics capabilities by using AI and machine learning to develop data-science algorithms based on the rich transaction data provided by SAP software.
As well as feeding into a repository for large language models, the data in SAP Datasphere will provide a foundation for future projects using generative AI.
As Kuppa says, “AI will support a lot of decision-making processes, be it on the create-to-make, distribution, quote-to-cash, or customer-delivery side. Similarly, on the operating table, surgeons can make the right decisions at the right time with less effort by having the right data on hand. In that way, AI will be part of the DNA of our entire product and services supply chain.”