Drive Efficiency and Provide Value in your SAP DevOps Journey

Users struggle with timelines due to the time spent in copying full production databases, executing a system refresh and validating data within the SAP landscape. A growing production database may also lead to further technical difficulties, which are exacerbated if the team has to deal with insufficient and poor quality data. This leads to lengthy development cycles and unsatisfactory results in the live environment. Organizations need high-quality data that is current and relevant when creating test environments on SAP. Conventional tools often replicate too much test data as well, costing IT valuable time and infrastructure resources. Qlik Gold Client improves the quality of data of non-production SAP environments by matching it to the actual production data. You can copy good quality data into the system and over time help restore the development life cycle. It will also reduce the associated risks that can occur when an excessive number of transports are released while following the traditional data copy process. This speeds up the testing process and lowers the outflow on infrastructure resources. The end result is a streamlined testing cycle with higher developer productivity and a firm check on the storage footprint of non-production data.

Benefits of Qlik Gold Client for Agile Data Management

• Qlik Gold Client lets users copy both master and/or transactional data from one SAP client into another in a highly selective manner.
• Data copies do not require any downtime
• Additional hardware is not required
• Entirely within own SAP namespace
• Export once, import many
• Assign roles—like admin, developer, testing, security—to let users access very specific functions

Work with Production or Non-production Data in Various Situations

Qlik Gold Client is used for various scenarios including production support, shorten test cycles, reduce infrastructure costs, mask confidential information when it leaves production, work with S4/HANA POC and enable SAP teams to move data faster in DevOps, divestiture and transformations to adhere to GDPR security regulations. In each scenario, Qlik Gold Client lets developers:

• Quickly select and copy relevant production or non-production data for testing purposes.
• Copy production data related to a support issue into a lower-level system which would allow users to troubleshoot and perform root cause analysis.
• Copy real data for training purposes rather than create the training data sets manually.
• Protect sensitive data—such as personally identifiable information (PII), tax IDs, bank account numbers, etc—by masking so that it is not at-risk in lower-level systems.

No registration required.

This page is sponsored by Qlik

The post Streamline Test Data Management and Drive Efficiencies in SAP Processes appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Learn how you can automate continuous delivery of real-time, analytics-ready data into AWS Data Warehouses or Data Lakes and make it easily accessible through a governed catalogue. Request a demo and talk with our solution experts, and learn how you can do more with Qlik and AWS, including:

• Real-time data for analytics in AWS
• Automated SAP data analytics in AWS
• Mainframe modernization with AWS
• Agile data warehouse automation for Redshift
• Data Lake ingestion and automation
• Analyse Data in AWS with Qlik Sense

See Qlik and AWS In Action

About Qlik

VINCI Energies: Using Qlik Gold Client to Carry Out a Large-Scale Migration Project

In 2018, VINCI Energies carried out one of the most significant Global S/4HANA migrations. The project was recognized by SAP as one of the most innovative projects of 2018. VINCI Energies also received an SAP Innovation trophy in 2019. Watch this video to find out how this leading company has developed a clear strategy with Gold Client, to carry out a large-scale migration project.

Data is the new Gold for Lenovo’s Strategic Advantage

Learn how Qlik enables Lenovo to discover insights faster and helps sales and operations teams deepen customer relationships.

This page is sponsored by Qlik

The post See Qlik Data Integration and Analytics in Action with AWS appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

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.

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

The post How Greene Tweed replicated SAP data to Microsoft Azure appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

As many businesses reinvent themselves through the pandemic, many are hyper focused on leveraging big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence to improve their business processes, personalize the customer experience or monetize data.

This requires integrating data across multiple systems; migrating compute and data storage to scalable cloud platforms; and expanding access to business-ready, up-to-date information to everyone in the organization.

But to accomplish this, businesses need flexibility.

Flexibility to unlock and provide governed but easy access to business data in systems, such as SAP and others; flexibility to choose any cloud compute and storage platform based on their companies’ needs and commercial economics; and flexibility to scale experimentation with big data machine learning models.

Responsive, automated data platforms underpin this agility with technology capabilities, such as no-code or low-code application development; more configuration versus manual coding; and active intelligence that makes continuous, up-to-date information available at the speed of business.

At Qlik, we are committed to helping organizations unlock and accelerate their full innovation potential. The Qlik platform enables real-time, cost-efficient data integration automation and world-class modern data analytics. Powerful data replication and automated analytics data pipelines make available enterprise data across diverse platforms and hybrid on-premise or cloud environments.

And the recently announced SAP solution accelerators jump start and accelerate end-to-end data modernization, helping businesses gain competitive advantages. SAP solution accelerators are now available for Order-to-Cash, Financials and Inventory Management.

Working hand-in-hand with our technology partners – Snowflake, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – Qlik has developed solution accelerators that build upon our proven data and analytics platform. Acceleration comes from agile data integrations, ever-refining data models, tailored key performance indicators and purpose-built analytic dashboards (see an example below).

These solution accelerators not only provide enormous value for SAP customers but also for Qlik partners in the SAP ecosystem. Remember this mantra: innovation, flexibility and acceleration.

Our SAP solution accelerators are just one way we can help you break away from the pack. For more information on how Qlik data integration and analytics solutions supercharge your SAP data in a trusted way that’s SAP certified, download your free copy of “3 ways to transform SAP data into value” now.

This article is sponsored by Qlik

The post Innovation + Flexibility + Acceleration = Competitive Business Advantage appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

However, current data architectures that exist in organizations today do not meet these customer requirements. A Forrester report showed that between 60 percent and 73 percent of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics. Fifty-two percent of SAP users as surveyed by SAPinsider – the largest SAP membership group worldwide – said that a top analytics pain point is data integration. And an Accenture survey revealed that only 32 percent of executives say they can create value from data!

If this is your situation, Qlik is here to help. To unlock the hidden insights in SAP data, Qlik is leading the industry in accelerating use of SAP data for actionable insights and decision making. We just launched the Qlik Order-to-Cash solution accelerators for SAP, the first in a series of SAP-focused data and analytics solution accelerators that speed the ROI of integrating SAP data with modern analytics projects.

Order-to-cash is a critical business process. It includes activities from booking and fulfilling an order to getting paid. Order fulfilment and billing affect customer experience and loyalty. Receivables management and payments affect working capital and cash. Given the times, what could be more important than taking care of your customers and taking care of cash so you can run your business smoothly?

However, order-to-cash also happens to be one of the more complex of business processes to optimize. It is highly fragmented across teams, as there are stakeholders in sales order management, in supply chain logistics and warehousing, and in finance billing, accounts receivables management, and financial accounting. In addition, the data is also fragmented across multiple systems. This is where Qlik’s data integration and data analytics platform shines.

The solution accelerators come with prebuilt components for SAP sales orders and accounts receivables data replication, data warehouse automation to a cloud platform of your choice (Azure Synapse, Microsoft SQL Server, Google BigQuery, Snowflake DW, AWS RedShift, etc.), as well as order-to-cash modern analytics.

The prebuilt data integration and transformation into order-to-cash analytics-ready data and KPIs can save months and thousands of hours of data effort. And, the prebuilt analytics components empower users of all levels of data skills with actionable insights via rich, interactive order-to-cash KPI dashboards, intelligent alerting and AI-enabled conversational analytics. Users don’t have to wait till next day for updates on sales bookings, billings, fulfilment or payments. If shipments are delayed, they can be notified in real-time and proactively contact fulfilment or the customer. If payments are predicted to be delayed, they can act fast and thus reduce days sales outstanding and optimize working capital.

With tremendous amount of order-to-cash and working capital performance management functionality already built-in, these accelerators can speed your SAP data modernization, enable more agility, and quickly deliver a business solution for order-to-cash analytics users.

To find out how your business can benefit from real-time modern analytics, join us for “How to Turn SAP Data into Critical Business Insights” on 20^th May 2021.

The session will cover:

• Learn how to build a strategy to modernize analytics to support core finance and order management functions such as order-to-cash.
• Provide real-time data from the various LoB applications and core ERP.
• See a live demo of how to actually transform raw SAP data into usable information and actionable insights for the business.
• Discover new ways to support order-to-cash visibility and important views into cash, liquidity, and working capital.

This article is sponsored by Qlik

The post Qlik Launches Order-to-Cash Solution Accelerators for SAP: Modern Real-time Analytics to Optimize Your Cash Flow appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.