For more than 150 years, Greene Tweed has developed materials and engineered high-performance solutions for critical applications in the automotive, aerospace, energy, semiconductor, oil and gas, life sciences, defense and other industries. Headquartered in Lansdale, Pennsylvania and active across the world, its products include O-rings, gaskets, other sealing products, coatings and connectors that are designed to cope with extreme temperature and are used in 90{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of commercial aircraft. Greene Tweed has been using SAP for more than 20 years and the data it holds is critical to running the whole organization. However, the many different extraction methods used for business reporting were slow, increased system overhead and delivered inconsistent data. As a result, data-driven initiatives they wanted to implement in the future such as AI-enabled operations, drives for efficiency and predictive analytics projects looked doubtful.

There was a need to standardize their data and find extraction methods that ensured those data was always accurate, consistent and trustworthy. “SAP is our single source of truth on almost everything and we only have one instance that runs our environment worldwide. Every time we reach into SAP and pull data we are putting stress on the system,” says David Hufnagle, Manager of Enterprise Data and Analytics, Greene Tweed.

Quick delivery of analytics-ready data

Greene Tweed moved to cloud on Microsoft Azure with Synapse analytics services. Having used Qlik analytics solutions since 2016, the company decided that Qlik Data Integration (QDI) was the best way to replicate their data from SAP to Azure. The QDI platform uses Change Data Capture (CDC) to efficiently analyze source systems like SAP to identify any new changes in the data, then captures only the changes, conforms the data and delivers it to target cloud systems like Azure Synapse. This CDC functionality delivers analytics-ready data from a wide range of sources to data warehouses and lakes, streaming and cloud platforms.

“The big benefit of QDI was the ability to pull data not just from transparent tables in SAP but also from other entities like cluster tables which are really hard to extract out of SAP,” says Hufnagle. “The fact that QDI had the dynamic drive overlay (DDO) and the metadata available to navigate those objects was a big plus.”

Low latency for huge data volumes

Utilizing CDC automation, change data is pulled from SAP to Azure Synapse and loaded every into Greene Tweed’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) environment. Seventy-seven million records in more than a hundred tables are replicated using QDI and the longest replication latency is 2.5 minutes.

“The biggest advantage we have seen so far is the times to develop analytics on the data from SAP have been cut to 70{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of previous because we do not have to write extracts anymore,” says Hufnagle. “We don’t have to write a logical layer because we have already incorporated that. It’s just a matter of going and grabbing the data. We’re quicker at getting things done because using data extracts from the cloud is faster than from SAP. “As we are rolling into this cloud environment using Qlik Data Integration, it’s all about the ability to use data to drive change through our organization. Qlik and Azure Synapse gives us the tools to do that.”

This article is sponsored by Qlik

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Malaysia is particularly interested in improving its efficiency and productivity; however, the lack of talents to fill the pipeline is still a problem. And data analytics programs are playing an important role in filling the lack of data talents.

SAP and Academia have been collaborating in raising the quality and quantity of data analytics talents in Southeast Asia. One of its initiatives includes the ASEAN Data Science Explorers (ASEANDSE) 2019 competition. 

The ASEANDSE aims to enhance the digital literacy skills of youths in the region by collaborating with industry leaders and initiating data analytics programs. It will also promote the importance of civic participation.

The ASEAN Foundation and SAP held the Malaysia leg of the competition on 19 September 2019 at the Monash University.

This year’s theme was Today’s Youth for Tomorrow’s World. It focused on finding the capacity of data analytics in potentially finding solutions to the problems that impact the people and the environment.

More than 270 students from all over Malaysia received training on SAP Analytics Cloud, which helped them fast-track their projects. After the training, they were tasked to pick a social issue impacting the Southeast Asian region and used the software to obtain relevant insights.

The social issue of their choice needs to be aligned with one of six United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: decent work and economic growth, gender equality, good health, industry, innovation and infrastructure, quality education, and sustainable cities and communities.

The judges for the competition consisted of representatives from the ASEAN Foundation, Impact Hub, Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), National Council of Women’s Organisation, SAP, and United Nations Development Programme.

Ten teams from seven participating universities presented their initiatives in the finals. Leong Zhuan Kee and Peh Wei Li, the winning team, presented data for their food sustainability project. They shared during an interview with Computer Weekly that the success of the presentation should be credited to the user-friendly industry solution provided by SAP.

MDEC’s share in boosting the data analytics talent pipeline

IDC shared the numbers of potential global revenues for big data and business analytics. According to the global market intelligence firm, the two technologies will surpass $210 billion in 2020 despite the 20,000-fold increase in data volumes between the year 2000 and year 2020.

MDEC’s data economy director, Karl Ng, also shared that big data is expected to boost Malaysia’s efficiency and productivity.

MDEC envisions a high-income and knowledge-based society by 2020. It has spearheaded ICT initiatives that focus on the data economy in hopes that it will become the foundation for artificial-intelligence initiatives. They have also been promoting the importance of continuous learning as an essential aspect of the digital culture of Malaysia.

IDC applauded initiatives such as the ASEAN Data Analytics Exchange (Adax), in its 2018 report. Adax is a regional platform that collaborates development models and talents and showcases the latest analytics technologies.

Adax has a proven track record of training 1,800 people from 298 companies across 19 industries since its establishment in 2017. These individuals learned skills to become data leaders, data managers, and data practitioners.

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