Access to vital SAP data

Founded in Germany in 1881, the luxury department store Breuninger is one of Germany’s most successful fashion and lifestyle businesses. With 5,500 employees, it offers 1,200 brands across 13 department stores in Germany and Luxembourg and an online storefront in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

Breuninger’s primary aim is to preserve and expand its market share by delivering excellent customer service. However, identifying customer needs and acting quickly with marketing campaigns relies on gaining real-time access to large amounts of data tied up in its SAP systems. The data access was problematic because traditional Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes require a lot of labor-intensive manual scripting and are prone to human error. Inaccurate and untrusted data is delivered when engineers add new data sources to brittle ETL pipelines.

Breuninger’s fragmented technology stack further complicated access to vital data, with many silos such as CRM, ERP, billing, inventory and POS, all with their sources and requirements. “SAP holds data on many corporate functions and also our 60-year-old Breuninger Card – a loyalty program built around an SAP sub-module,” says Matthias Krenzel, Head of Data Platform Services, Breuninger.

“One of our unique challenges was to get that data out of SAP faster because our CRM team needs close to real-time data to drive its campaigns. The key was how quickly after purchase we could enable customers to share their insights on what they had just bought, and that meant getting the data out of SAP as fast as possible.”

Quicker data pipeline builds

Breuninger decided to use BigQuery, Google Cloud’s fully managed enterprise data warehouse. BigQuery’s data security features make it ideal for the sensitive datasets held in SAP systems; it can accommodate both SAP and non-SAP data and easily integrates with SAP.

The missing component for near real-time data access was a tool to transfer data from SAP to BigQuery efficiently. Already a satisfied user of Qlik analytics software, Breuninger chose the open, end-to-end Qlik Data Integration platform featuring Qlik Replicate.

“Having our warehouse based on BigQuery, we wanted tight integration with the existing stack,” adds Matthias. “We did not want to start from scratch and needed a solution that would leave us free to concentrate on our core competency of serving the customer.”

For a proof of concept (POC), Breuninger set up SAP as the data source, and the initial target was a PostgreSQL database in Google Cloud and from there on to BigQuery. In the POC Qlik’s engineers set up the pipelines in just a few hours, and the POC revealed that data delivery was as near real-time as possible. Qlik Replicate allows Breuninger to integrate SAP data with other data from various sources across the company then consolidate it all in BigQuery.

Near real-time data for sound decisions

Continuous end-to-end availability of analysis data, automated processes and Qlik’s Change Data Capture (CDC) technology enables the company to deliver faster data for decision-makers. Decreasing daily SAP demands also means it can reduce money spent on external SAP contractors.

“The Qlik solution automatically carries over any schema changes at the source to the target and is nearly maintenance-free, to the point that I would say it’s the least maintenance-intensive pipeline we run,” says Matthias. “When I didn’t get any error messages, I had to keep checking that Replicate was still working. It was!”

Looking to the future, Breuninger plans to add new SAP data sources for new use cases and is now looking to extend the use of the Qlik Data Integration platform to other source systems beyond SAP. It is also looking at CDC for other on-prem relational databases.

“Effective use of data analytics in real-time to address customer needs is a critical part of our business as a modern retailer,” concludes Matthias. “With Qlik Data Integration automating the flow of data from SAP and various other systems into BigQuery, we’re confidently able to respond to market changes with the timely data we need for good business decisions.”

This article is sponsored by Qlik

The post How a Luxury Retailer Uses Near Real-time Data to Improve Customer Service and Grow Market Share appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

The Partnership that Accelerates Delivery of Insights

You may be aware that the Qlik Data Integration Platform is now available on Google Cloud Marketplace and can accelerate the integration of data from SAP with other data sets in real-time into Google Cloud BigQuery for modern cloud data warehousing at scale.

Recently, Qlik also became a foundational partner for Google Cloud Cortex Framework which helps support SAP customers in delivering innovation and business outcomes faster with a rich set of data foundation building blocks including predefined operational data marts, change data processing, and machine learning templates for common business scenarios. With this partnership, the powerful combination of Qlik and Google Cloud solutions help take the guesswork out of delivering analytics and insights at scale, and accelerates time to value.

The Problem to be Solved

SAP is the core to many enterprises and the data that resides in ERP is highly useful for making strategic decisions. Although approximately 70% of the content in SAP ERP implementations is standard reusable content since SAP ERP implementations have baseline business modules to everyday business processes such as Financials, Inventory Management, Procure to Pay, and Order to Cash, access to this data to combine it with other cross enterprise data sets for advanced insights can be difficult.

By leveraging repeatable analytics solution accelerators from Qlik and Google Cloud, customers can kick start the process of delivering real time data from SAP and other data sets into a consolidated enterprise data warehouse with built in data cataloging capability for faster analytical insights that help drive competitive advantage.

Extracting Value from SAP data with Qlik and Google Cloud

With Qlik as a preferred Google Cloud Cortex Framework partner, you get complete end-to-end SAP source to insight solution accelerators running on Google Cloud. By leveraging Qlik Replicate, customers can quickly move data from SAP ERP (ECC or S4/HANA) and other datasets in real time to BigQuery for fast and fresh insights.

With Qlik Compose, customers can automate data warehouse modeling, creation, deployment, updates and documentation to accelerate time to value of the data within BigQuery as well as take advantage of the analytics-ready data marts and content available for standard business processes provided by both Qlik and Google Cloud. Finally, customers can leverage Qlik Sense for advanced analytics and plug and play reporting templates.

Learn More

Together, Qlik and Google Cloud, drive value and innovation for SAP enterprises that helps you get the most out of your SAP investment. To learn more, download the “Qlik and the Google Cloud Cortex Framework” whitepaper. For more on Qlik and Google Cloud visit the Google Cloud Marketplace or the Google Cloud Migration & Data Transfer – Google Cloud Platform | Qlik page.

This article is sponsored by Qlik

The post Driving Value for Enterprises using SAP with Qlik and Google Cloud Cortex Framework appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.