A glob­al leader in audi­ence insights, data, and ana­lyt­ics, Nielsen shapes the future of media by pro­vid­ing accu­rate mea­sure­ments of what peo­ple lis­ten to and watch. 

Best known for its Nielsen rat­ings, which mea­sure the audi­ences for tele­vi­sion, radio, and news­pa­pers in media mar­kets, Nielsen mea­sures view­er­ship behav­ior across var­i­ous chan­nels and plat­forms, from stream­ing plat­forms like Net­flix, Max, Pea­cock, Prime Video, and Dis­ney+ to prime broad­cast tele­vi­sion net­works like CBS, FOX, ABC, and NBC. 

For years, Nielsen rat­ings have been a decid­ing fac­tor in can­cel­ing and renew­ing tele­vi­sion shows at tele­vi­sion net­works. Uncov­er­ing what audi­ences love and empow­er­ing its clients with trust­ed intel­li­gence to fuel busi­ness actions is all in a day’s work for the media research firm, which is head­quar­tered in New York City and has an inno­va­tion cen­ter in Tam­pa, Florida.

SAP at Nielsen

As a glob­al leader in cross-plat­form media mea­sure­ment, Nielsen — which oper­ates in more than 55 coun­tries — uses the SAP suite of prod­ucts to ensure the suc­cess of its enter­prise plat­form oper­a­tions, accord­ing to Indra­jit Roy, VP of Tech­nol­o­gy at Nielsen. 

In 2021, after 15 years of run­ning SAP ERP Cen­tral Com­po­nent (ECC), Nielsen made the deci­sion to move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, pri­vate edi­tion, approach­ing this upgrade as an over­ar­ch­ing busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion project. In doing so, Nielsen estab­lished ​“an ecosys­tem of dig­i­tal tools to enable our desired cul­ture of self-ser­vice and data trust, with a learn-it-all men­tal­i­ty,” Roy told ASUG in a recent interview.

Inside Project Cheetah

To enable a mod­ern dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence for Nielsen and sup­port the company’s strate­gic imper­a­tives, the scope of Nielsen’s 24-month SAP plat­form update project and relat­ed change man­age­ment project (dubbed Project Chee­tah) involved mod­ern­iz­ing HR, finance, sales, and pro­cure­ment systems. 

To do so, Nielsen select­ed SAP Finance, SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, SAP Billing and Rev­enue Inno­va­tion Man­age­ment (BRIM), and SAP Ari­ba for pro­cure-to-pay, in addi­tion to mov­ing for­ward with its larg­er SAP S/4HANA upgrade. ​“Our ulti­mate end goal was to deliv­er what we called myDig­i­tal Expe­ri­ence (mDX), com­bin­ing SAP S/4HANA and oth­er online tools to ensure that all of our users were com­plete­ly empow­ered for self-ser­vice,” Roy explained.

Key Out­comes of Nielsen’s SAP Project Journey

In addi­tion to empow­er­ing Nielsen’s employ­ees, mDX aimed to decrease their man­u­al work­load, increase data qual­i­ty, and elim­i­nate dupli­ca­tion. Oth­er areas of focus for the project included: 

• Dri­ving con­sis­ten­cy with indus­try best prac­tices, work­flow effi­cien­cies, and automation
• Cre­at­ing com­pa­ra­bil­i­ty with a sin­gle source of prod­uct, client, finan­cial, and employ­ee data truth with­in SAP
• Build­ing a ​“growth cul­ture” of empow­er­ment, agili­ty, and data integrity

Though the project was slight­ly delayed due to issues with data man­age­ment and Nielsen’s com­pli­cat­ed con­tract migra­tion load, most­ly spe­cif­ic to meet­ing SAP BRIM’s data migra­tion and man­age­ment require­ments, Nielsen suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed Project Chee­tah with­in its antic­i­pat­ed 24-month target. 

How Nielsen Lever­ages SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Platform 

In prepar­ing Nielsen for future growth, its IT team seeks to dri­ve inno­va­tion and sta­bil­i­ty simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, via a bimodal IT approach that lever­ages SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) for the company’s SAP systems. 

Adopt­ing this bimodal strat­e­gy will keep Nielsen’s core SAP sys­tems clean, lever­ag­ing SAP BTP for exten­si­bil­i­ty and cus­tomiza­tion. ​“At the core of SAP is the idea of the intel­li­gent enter­prise, which means that your sys­tem should have a sta­ble core but also be agile,” Roy explained. ​“Your basic process­es and func­tion­al­i­ties can’t be com­pro­mised or at risk of break­ing, but at the same time you should be nim­ble enough to cater to spe­cif­ic needs and chang­ing mar­ket conditions.” 

Keep­ing the SAP Core Clean for Fur­ther Innovations

Keep­ing the core of Nielsen’s SAP land­scape clean from cus­tomiza­tions was a pri­or­i­ty for Roy through­out Project Chee­tah, to avoid accru­ing tech­ni­cal debt that will pre­vent Nielsen from fur­ther upgrad­ing its systems. 

“Doing this will make your life eas­i­er dur­ing fur­ther upgrades,” he said. ​“SAP BTP cre­ates a par­al­lel, cloud-based plat­form you can lever­age to do all your cus­tomiza­tions, enhance­ments, inte­gra­tions, data and ana­lyt­ics, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, and so on, with­out touch­ing the core or mak­ing com­plex mod­i­fi­ca­tions in the core sys­tems itself.” 

At the out­set of Project Chee­tah, Roy and his team were not famil­iar enough with SAP BTP to ful­ly lever­age its capa­bil­i­ties. As a result, the team con­tin­ued to make enhance­ments in Nielsen’s core sys­tems, Roy explained. But as they’ve learned more about the capa­bil­i­ties of SAP BTP for clean data, data-dri­ven deci­sion-mak­ing, con­tin­u­ous process automa­tion, low-code exten­si­bil­i­ty, and appli­ca­tion test­ing, Roy said Nielsen is com­mit­ted to mak­ing enhance­ments in SAP BTP.

Using SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud and SAP Data­s­phere for Data-Dri­ven Insights

While Nielsen’s SAP S/4HANA upgrade project required Roy’s team to focus ini­tial­ly on ensur­ing that the enterprise’s data was clean, to allow for a smooth trans­for­ma­tion, the team is now focused on lever­ag­ing SAP BTP for data-dri­ven deci­sion-mak­ing along­side SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud and SAP Data­s­phere, which Nielsen is run­ning on SAP BTP. ​“We’re heav­i­ly lever­ag­ing SAP BTP right now to under­stand where we stand as a busi­ness and where our oppor­tu­ni­ties for improve­ment are,” he said.

Mov­ing Toward a Clean Appli­ca­tion State at Nielsen

Advanced Finan­cial Clos­ing with SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Already, Nielsen has enabled SAP BTP ser­vices for advanced finan­cial clos­ing with its U.S. oper­a­tions, the first with­in Nielsen to move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, pri­vate edi­tion. For this process, Nielsen lever­ages SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Advanced Finan­cial Clos­ing, inte­grat­ing apps and process­es into a stream­lined process while enabling def­i­n­i­tion, pro­cess­ing, and mon­i­tor­ing of the finan­cial close. 

“Using the Advanced Finan­cial Clos­ing cock­pit was a big help in terms of cre­at­ing the tem­plates, task list, approval flows, noti­fi­ca­tions, mon­i­tor­ing, and more, try­ing to auto­mate it as much as pos­si­ble,” Roy said, who expects to ulti­mate­ly see a 50% improve­ment in this process. ​“This will be a mas­sive improve­ment in our finan­cial clos­ing process once ful­ly stabilized.

Replac­ing Lega­cy Inte­gra­tion Tools with SAP BTP Inte­gra­tion Suite

Addi­tion­al­ly, Nielsen’s SAP Doc­u­ment Man­age­ment Sys­tem (DMS) app, to store employ­ee HXM infor­ma­tion, was devel­oped using Busi­ness Appli­ca­tion Stu­dio with­in SAP BTP, and SAP BTP Inte­gra­tion Suite has been used to inte­grate var­i­ous on-premis­es as well as cloud processes. 

“We removed all our PI/PO sys­tems and all our oth­er inte­gra­tion soft­ware com­plete­ly, so we are exclu­sive­ly using SAP BTP Inte­gra­tion Suite for our inte­gra­tions,” Roy said. ​“The idea was to make it cohe­sive with our SAP S/4HANA moves, and it fit our require­ments very well.”

Nielsen’s land­scape includes around 40 exter­nal sys­tems, con­nect­ed through SAP BTP Inte­gra­tion Suite, and more than 150 inte­gra­tions that con­nect not only exter­nal sys­tems but inter­nal ones as well for mas­ter data gov­er­nance, SAP S/4HANA, SAP ECC, cloud-based sys­tems like SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, and plat­forms like Sales­force. ​“The advan­tage of SAP BTP Inte­gra­tion Suite is that it has a lot of pre-built inter­faces, which are real­ly help­ful,” Roy said. ​“It could be eas­i­ly copied over for us to make cus­tom changes when required.”

A Con­stant Focus on Change Management

Roy cred­its robust change man­age­ment ini­tia­tives at Nielsen with the project’s over­all suc­cess. Giv­en the two-year win­dow allot­ted to the project’s com­ple­tion, lead­er­ship had time to become involved, pro­vide feed­back, and receive infor­ma­tion in a reli­able manner. 

“The infor­ma­tion flow was con­stant,” Roy explained. ​“At first, we pro­vid­ed lead­er­ship with the infor­ma­tion that change was com­ing. As we moved for­ward, we mea­sured spe­cif­ic changes incre­men­tal­ly, try­ing to design the most suit­able way to han­dle them and mak­ing sure we under­stood which groups would be impact­ed, as well as how best to address that with those groups through train­ing and spe­cial devel­op­ment programs.”

In Nielsen’s pro­cure-to-pay oper­a­tions, for exam­ple, the entire user base, com­pris­ing more than 10,000 peo­ple, had to be trained in the new ERP sys­tem while adopt­ing it. Despite the project’s scope, Nielsen’s trans­for­ma­tion was received well inter­nal­ly, and the orga­ni­za­tion faced few chal­lenges in adop­tion of new sys­tems, appli­ca­tions, and processes. 

“Peo­ple were recep­tive to the sys­tem,” Roy recalled. Nielsen still expe­ri­ences what he calls ​“teething” chal­lenges, which he acknowl­edged are not uncom­mon in large-scale busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion projects, but sys­tem and user adop­tion has been strong thus far. To address chal­lenges along the way, Nielsen engages SAP Max­At­ten­tion for hands-on sup­port, which Roy said has been a pos­i­tive experience. 

“Wher­ev­er we face any issues, they’re with us in try­ing to get into the core of the prob­lems, to solve or at least find out the root cause of the issue, then giv­ing us sug­ges­tions so that we can act accord­ing­ly to make sure that prob­lem is elim­i­nat­ed,” he said. 

Key Lessons Learned from Nielsen’s Transformation

“Any­body who’s embark­ing on an SAP S/4HANA jour­ney must under­stand the capa­bil­i­ties of SAP BTP,” Roy said, reflect­ing on over­all take­aways from the suc­cess of Project Chee­tah and Nielsen’s busi­ness transformation. 

Under­stand­ing SAP’s Clean Core Strat­e­gy and Roadmap

To suc­ceed in an SAP busi­ness process trans­for­ma­tion, under­stand­ing the SAP prod­uct inno­va­tion roadmap — par­tic­u­lar­ly the ratio­nale for its clean-core strat­e­gy — is non-nego­tiable, Roy added. Though all orga­ni­za­tions tend to think of their busi­ness process­es and tech­nol­o­gy usage as unique and dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing, this is less often the case than many believe, Roy said, adding that the ques­tion of how to over­come this obsta­cle is where SAP BTP comes into the pic­ture. ​“SAP BTP should be front and cen­ter of the trans­for­ma­tions now tak­ing place across the SAP land­scape,” he said. 

That’s not to say that SAP BTP is a ​“mag­ic bul­let” for all process improve­ments at the mod­ern enter­prise, and under­stand­ing the platform’s capa­bil­i­ties are key to effec­tive­ly lever­ag­ing it, Roy added. For exam­ple, SAP BTP requires man­u­al con­fig­u­ra­tion of all con­nec­tion para­me­ters (such as cer­tifi­cates, pub­lic keys, encryp­tion keys, and basic cre­den­tials) in all environments. 

Lever­ag­ing Pre-Built Con­tent for Faster Enhancements

How­ev­er, con­nec­tiv­i­ty to the cloud is eas­i­er in SAP BTP than in on-premis­es land­scapes, he said, and SAP BTP offers pre-built busi­ness con­tent for line-of-busi­ness and indus­try use cas­es while equip­ping orga­ni­za­tions with cus­tomiza­tion capa­bil­i­ties based on their needs. 

“All we have to do is take pre­built con­tent, copy them, and then cus­tomize based on your spe­cif­ic needs,” he said. ​“That’s a huge help; you don’t have to start the devel­op­ment from scratch. You can use built-in con­tent, cus­tomize it, and make it usable for you, which makes the enhance­ment life­cy­cle much quicker.”

What’s Next for Nielsen’s SAP BTP Journey

Plan­ning Side-by-Side Enhance­ments to Extend SAP Functionality

Nielsen is cur­rent­ly con­sid­er­ing where to take its usage of SAP BTP. Next up for its over­all tech­nol­o­gy roadmap: side-by-side enhance­ments in SAP BTP to keep Nielsen’s core SAP sys­tems clean. ​“Once we sta­bi­lize our sys­tem com­plete­ly, that’s where we’re going: mov­ing toward a clean appli­ca­tion state, keep­ing the core clean, and improv­ing our oper­a­tions with side-by-side enhancements.”

Explor­ing New Use Cas­es: Automa­tion, Invoic­ing, and HR Processes

Fur­ther ahead, Roy hopes that Nielsen can explore con­tin­u­ous process automa­tion and sim­pli­fy process­es by estab­lish­ing eas­i­er work­flows through SAP BTP, empow­er­ing its users to make low-code/no-code exten­sions based on spe­cif­ic work­flows. Appli­ca­tion and automa­tion test­ing will come lat­er down the road, but SAP BTP will be essen­tial there as well, Roy said. 

Addi­tion­al­ly, Nielsen is con­sid­er­ing SAP BTP for auto­mat­ed invoice pro­cess­ing, intel­li­gent expense man­age­ment, HR process automa­tion, con­tract life­cy­cle man­age­ment, and real-time data inte­gra­tion and ana­lyt­ics for future SAP BTP usage. ​“Of course, we also want to lever­age SAP Data­s­phere and SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, as well as our inter­nal SAP S/4HANA-based ana­lyt­ics plat­form, to make sure we have bet­ter and more robust ana­lyt­ics over­all, to con­tin­u­al­ly check our process­es,” Roy said. 

Over­all, at Nielsen, ​“we’re look­ing to see how SAP BTP can help us improve our process­es and make it even eas­i­er to even­tu­al­ly serve the end goal of empow­er­ing our employ­ees to self-serve their require­ments,” he added.

Reflect­ing on the trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney at Nielsen, Roy expressed sat­is­fac­tion with the over­all results of Project Chee­tah. ​“It’s been a long jour­ney, with so many dif­fer­ent peo­ple, teams, and areas of exper­tise,” he said. ​“And it’s been tough, with a lot of hard work for our peo­ple, but we even­tu­al­ly reached where we want­ed to reach. We’re not ful­ly there yet. There are still chal­lenges. But we’re work­ing toward mak­ing sure that we can solve those issues as well. Over­all, it’s progress in the right direction.”

This cus­tomer sto­ry from Nielsen was first pre­sent­ed at the ASUG Flori­da Chap­ter Meet­ing on Feb. 23, 2024. For addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion, review Indra­jit Roy’s pre­sen­ta­tion here.