Colsubsidio: Optimizing existing solutions with a unified digital platform
Explore Colsubsidio’s journey with SAP
A nonprofit provider of wide-ranging social services in Colombia, Colsubsidio needed to connect its on-premise and cloud solutions with open-source technologies favored by its data science teams. It chose SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP HANA Cloud to enable extensive solution integrations, helping deliver better data connectivity and operational efficiency.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Healthcare | Bogotá, Colombia | 16,000 employees |
reports, dashboards, and advanced analytics models developed.
staff using the SAP Data Intelligence Cloud solution.
Head of Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics, Colsubsidio
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Healthcare | Bogotá, Colombia | 16,000 employees |
reports, dashboards, and advanced analytics models developed.
staff using the SAP Data Intelligence Cloud solution.
Head of Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics, Colsubsidio
Combining existing solutions with open-source technologies
Colsubsidio is a nonprofit organization in Colombia that has roughly 1.5 million affiliates delivering social services in sectors such as health, retail, hotels and tourism, sports and recreation, food and beverages, financial services, and housing.
The organization’s IT infrastructure was contained within on-premise and cloud solutions from SAP. These included SAP Big Data Services, the SAP BW/4HANA and SAP Data Intelligence solutions, and several business intelligence and business analytics offerings, such as SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence suite, add-on for SAP Lumira software. The main limitation Colsubsidio faced was being able to integrate these solutions with the open-source tools and other technologies used by the data science teams in their daily work. Also, the predictive analytics offerings were no longer fit for purpose. And there was a lack of system capacity for running certain models, coupled with inadequate elasticity and scalability to match growing business and data needs. Finally, with SAP Data Intelligence installed on the Google Kubernetes Engine infrastructure, the organization was subject to adding unnecessary points of failure and increasing the total cost of ownership.
Colsubsidio wanted to build an intelligent data application to better integrate an advanced analytics cloud environment with its existing solutions, repowering them by connecting to specific programming languages and libraries to offer enhanced visualization, statistical analysis, and general data-science features. It also wanted to take advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities offered by a new infrastructure.
Head of Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics, Colsubsidio
Deploying an intelligent data application to drive business transformation
To optimize the use of its existing SAP solutions with an intelligent data application, Colsubsidio chose to implement SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) for the Cloud Foundry environment. The platform is natively integrated with its existing business intelligence infrastructure and enables connectivity with open-source programming languages, such as R, Python, Spark, PAL, APL, and JavaScript, and various libraries, including Dash. It uses Docker software and elastic capabilities to allow capacity to isolate environments for running several models according to specific configurations. And SAP BTP facilitates many new features for developing processes with machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies.
The organization transitioned from SAP Big Data Services to SAP HANA Cloud and from the SAP Data Intelligence solution to the SAP Data Intelligence Cloud solution. It’s also integrating the data lake component of SAP HANA Cloud with SAP BW/4HANA and will eventually move from the latter to the SAP Datasphere solution. Colsubsidio is gradually migrating from the add-on for SAP Lumira for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence suite to take advantage of the new capabilities of the SAP Analytics Cloud solution in the Cloud Foundry environment.
Head of Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics, Colsubsidio
Optimizing information and data analysis for improved decision-making
The implementation of SAP BTP, as well as an intelligent data app, has greatly improved the adoption of business intelligence and advanced analytics solutions by the data science teams. They now use the solutions extensively and can create their own reports, dashboards, and advanced analytics models. To date, the data scientists have developed more than 200 of these resources by harnessing content from the data lake and data warehouse. This has greatly helped them achieve their strategic, tactical, and operational objectives by focusing on more-efficient information use, significantly reducing the time to extract and analyze data for decision-making support. With deeper knowledge of the business, they no longer require intermediary consultants. And as they become more self-sufficient and proficient at using the technologies in SAP BTP, it frees up the business intelligence team to focus on technical infrastructure support. All of this generates strong operational efficiency for Colsubsidio.
There’s better interoperability and connectivity of information between the solutions and various programming languages and libraries, and the elastic capabilities enable Colsubsidio to execute high-volume data loads. There’s more system stability and capacity as well as improved integration with the organization’s other cloud and on-premise systems. The benefit of using SAP Data Intelligence Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud together is the ability to access all the data in the data lake and data warehouse to conduct the necessary analytics for delivering services as efficiently as possible. This can be done without having to run the advanced analytics or machine learning models separately.
The results are tangible. For example, the pharmacy business at Colsubsidio developed an advanced analytics model for its intelligent data app, using SAP HANA Cloud, PAL, and APL, to predict the weekly demand for medical supplies by customers and affiliates. It then knows what to purchase in its ERP application at a given time. Another model created by the health services team can forecast hospital bed numbers to assist with capacity planning. Within financial services, classification models help the teams match product suggestions with client profiles. And, charged with the vaccination program during the COVID-19 pandemic, Colsubsidio used its business intelligence capabilities to help the government identify the necessary vaccine quantities, locations, and recipients.
Head of Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics, Colsubsidio
Continuously developing technologies for an intelligent business
Colsubsidio is still growing its data science teams and, over time, they’ll be able to develop more intelligent data apps thanks to SAP Business Technology Platform for the Cloud Foundry environment. There are about 30 people presently using SAP Data Intelligence Cloud, but this number continues to rise as more staff are trained.
The organization plans to strengthen and increase its use of SAP Analytics Cloud to conduct information visualizations and analysis, SAP Data Intelligence Cloud to build integrations, and the SAP HANA Cloud database and the data lake component of SAP HANA Cloud to benefit from advanced analytics capabilities. As use of these implemented solutions matures, Colsubsidio will evolve to other applications. For example, in the medium term, it intends to replace SAP BW/4HANA with the SAP Datasphere solution.