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.

Insights that can be gleaned from mining different new data sets can prove invaluable – particularly when existing data sets don’t reflect new or changing circumstances. For example, City Plumbing, a plumbing and heating company and part of Travis Perkins group in the UK, integrated historical industry sales data with its own sales information to create a predictive forecast that helped them navigate the new pandemic business environment. However, accessing and integrating data manually in these different systems can take up to 70{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of the time estimated for an analytics project and often requires skills which are in short supply.

In fact, our research with IDC revealed that in 2020, over two-fifths of US business leaders reported that their organization had introduced new external data (40{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}), new internal data (45{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}) and new data types (45{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}). The study also showed that more source data is in more disparate locations: on multiple cloud platforms, on-premises, and at the edge. In order to pull all that data together, an integration tool like Qlik Data Integration (QDI) is the best way to replicate the data from SAP and other sources to cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure.

Data Integration Challenges

However, the process of extracting, transforming and consolidating disparate data sources is not without its challenges. Traditional data integration processes, such as manually extracting, transforming and loading data (ETL), are proving unfit for today’s agile business environment. These traditional methods are time-intensive, costly and often error-prone. Also while many companies are often more adept at integrating data from the cloud, they still need to ensure that they are mining all sources to gain a complete picture. Pulling data from on-premise, mainframes, SAP, various databases, or even alternative cloud sources often involves heavy coding and deep scripting, leaving skilled workers investing time in manual integration when their expertise could be better utilized elsewhere in the business.

Finding Tools That Fit Business Needs

Companies need integration solutions that keep pace with their business by automating and streamlining the integration process. The right integration tools can be transformative for a company, enabling them to take advantage of diverse and disparate data to support the bottom line. These include:

Avoiding cloud lock-in: Organizations need to ensure they’re not locking themselves into a single-cloud vendor. When new data needs capturing, it is important that the selected tool can integrate data from new sources quickly and effectively.

Removing the risk of human error: Modern data integration tools can automate the integration process, removing human error, connecting data sources faster and more effectively. Modern tools automate tasks associated with ingesting, replicating, and synchronizing data across the enterprise. This means that – often for the first time in their operations – analysts have comprehensive, instant data insights without the risk of incorrect data making its way into the pipeline.

Real-time integration: Automating ELT also offers businesses the ability to integrate data in real-time – across on-premise and cloud environments – into one target. A platform that uses automation in the context of Change Data Capture (CDC) enables data from all different sources to be replicated and streamed, as and when changes occur, for near real-time analysis. This gives the business agility to respond quickly to new data and ensures that they can host and analyze it in an optimal cloud platform.

Getting The Complete Picture

Data integration doesn’t have to be a headache. The right solutions can simplify and automate the process, allowing businesses to focus on the insights that inform decisions, rather than concentrating on how to get them to the right place. Automating the integration process from SAP, on-premise or multiple databases eliminates human-error and time-intensive manual integration, giving a business the agility to respond quickly to real-time insights. Using modern and automated data integration technology solutions and techniques, organizations can reduce data integration costs by up to a third and halve the time it takes to get to useful insights from data. By creating a single version of truth through organization-wide automation, businesses can ensure every team member is equipped with a complete, comprehensive picture to inform decision-making and improve business outcomes.

This article is sponsored by Qlik

The post Integrating New Data Sources with SAP appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

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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