Oxiquim: Delivering the formula for smart decision-making with rich planning data and smooth budgeting processes
Harnessing next-generation analytics and planning
Having outgrown its on-premises financial planning and forecasting software, chemicals company Oxiquim decided it was time to move to the cloud. With the SAP Analytics Cloud solution, it has improved data quality, sped up budgeting processes, and empowered diverse teams to make informed decisions that help the business grow.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Chemicals | Santiago, Chile | 430 employees | Henley |
minutes to run the annual budget, down from a day.
downtime during database updates.
minutes to compare scenarios, down from hours or even days.
Head of Management Control and Analytics, Oxiquim S.A.
Centralizing and enhancing planning for greater speed and intelligence
For more than 70 years, Oxiquim S.A. has been a key link in the value chain for diverse industrial companies seeking commodity and specialty chemicals and related services. Whether producing resins for the wood-board industry or providing maritime terminal services for bulk liquids, Oxiquim offers every customer its deep market knowledge, highly skilled experts, and dedicated infrastructure.
Oxiquim aims to be a fully sustainable company with people at its center. An integrated management system underpins this commitment to worker health and safety, environmental stewardship, product and service quality, stakeholder relationships, and continuous process improvement. It’s no surprise, then, that the company was the first in Chile to obtain an environmental, social, and governance loan from Santander Bank to support its sustainability initiatives.
The scale and variety of these operations require robust financial planning and forecasting, which the company’s decade-old on-premises software could not support. For example, separate sales and financial planning processes meant it could take all day to create the annual budget. And making a simple change to the company’s vast sales database, such as adding a new customer or account, could make the data inaccessible for up to 24 hours.
Oxiquim decided it was the right time to update its planning software to increase efficiency, tap into advanced capabilities, and improve decision-making across the company.
Head of Management Control and Analytics, Oxiquim S.A.
Focusing on an intuitive experience from day one
After a two-year evaluation of available planning tools and vendors, Oxiquim decided that the SAP Analytics Cloud solution was the right choice for its needs. As well as the attraction of its user-friendly mobile app, important selling points were the solution’s cloud-based nature and its ability to smoothly access data from both internal and third-party systems and integrate analytics and planning. Oxiquim also knew that SAP Analytics Cloud would align smoothly with its existing instance of the SAP ERP application.
SAP partner Henley supported the implementation, offering deep solution expertise and extensive knowledge of data models. Carolina Ocares, Oxiquim’s head of management control and analytics, explains, “It’s vital in these deployments to have a clean, well-designed data model. That makes analysis so much easier. It’s also key to have a clear business model and business rules before implementation.” For example, as well as replicating ERP-based cost allocations in the solution, the company developed rules for different types of sales calculations so that it could replicate these accurately in SAP Analytics Cloud.
Oxiquim focused on user experience from the outset, specifying colors and fonts and preparing for responsive mobile design. According to Ocares, “These may seem like small things, but they make the difference between creating something useful and something confusing.” Working with an expert in dashboard design helped ensure the solution was usable and clear.
Head of Management Control and Analytics, Oxiquim S.A.
Speeding up financial planning and nimbly sharing reliable data
After the successful implementation of SAP Analytics Cloud, Oxiquim now benefits from a robust data model, a well-structured data warehouse, and strong data governance. With distribution cycles and cost allocations smoothly replicated from SAP ERP to SAP Analytics Cloud, its new budgeting processes are now highly consistent and based on actual data.
The company can adapt business rules more easily thanks to the solution’s intuitive visualization tools. Ocares adds, “We have modules for finance, sales, inventory valuation, physical stock, and in-transit stock, all of which are critical for purchasing and supplier negotiations. Each area can review the available dashboards and tell us what they’d like to see, and we work with them to build something truly useful. For example, we built an HR model that includes workforce data such as number of vacancies for each area, temporary workers, and contractors.”
Executive teams can consult meaningful, accurate data supported by charts and tables to make agile, informed business decisions. And it takes just minutes to compare different scenarios, such as “with or without a client” or “with or without a business line.”
The annual budgeting process can also be completed in minutes, instead of taking a full day. Ocares says, “Previously, we had to notify the entire company that the budgeting system would be down for a day, and we couldn’t do any analysis or reporting during that time. Now, we can make these changes without interrupting people.” What’s more, updating the sales database has become as straightforward as amending a spreadsheet, and the company can quickly add new properties to fields, such as a customer alias, or group by company or segment.
Version copying has proven very useful too—for example, in exchange rate analyses, which used to be based on estimates but now use real data, allowing the company to more accurately calculate the impact of exchange rates on monthly results.
The solution’s overall flexibility has encouraged adoption, with Ocares explaining: “The experience has been super positive. Word of mouth has helped a lot, with people saying, ‘Hey, I saw this in the system, I want to try it.’ And that’s been the case across many different areas.”
Exploring new planning features and broadening usage across the firm
Now that Oxiquim has smoothly implemented SAP Analytics Cloud, one new plan for the future is to explore the capabilities of the solution’s mobile app. According to Ocares, ”We’ve already built some dashboards that work really well, and we want to continue down that path.”
The company intends to enable engineering teams to monitor projects directly in SAP Analytics Cloud, taking advantage of two-hourly updates that support near-real-time data. It’s also modernizing its on-premises ERP systems with SAP S/4HANA to take advantage of SAP Business Suite packages and offerings.
In the longer term, Oxiquim intends to integrate operational data that currently resides outside SAP ERP with SAP Analytics Cloud. And it plans to roll out the solution more widely so that diverse users can unlock the full potential of its data through advanced, collaborative analytics and planning.
Featured partner
Henley helps clients use business intelligence tools to analyze the large volumes of data generated by their ERP systems. Its services span integration, budgeting and planning, and data, process, and IT management. Henley’s deep expertise of data models and SAP Analytics Cloud helped Oxiquim adopt the solution speedily and efficiently.