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

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

In November 2020, SAP Korea had announced during a virtual conference in celebration of SAP HANA’s 10^th anniversary that it will build the country’s first data center to provide a secure and reliable infrastructure for customers. Five months after the announcement, the first SAP Data Center in Korea has officially opened this week to accelerate organizations’ journey to the Intelligent Enterprise while meeting data security and sovereignty requirements.

Lee Seong-yeol, CEO of SAP Korea, said:

“SAP Korea has further strengthened its ability to provide solutions to domestic companies faster through the opening of this data center, allowing various business departments to quickly introduce the desired solution and realize data value quickly. SAP Korea will provide necessary solutions to domestic companies in various industries and support them to successfully transform into intelligent companies .”

First Stage Completion

The first data center in Korea is part of the software company’s multi-cloud strategy designed to help its customers in their business transformation journey. As part of the data center’s two-stage plan, the currently completed first stage will be offering core services related to application development and process integration such as:

• SAP HANA cloud-based database and data management related services
• DevOps environment
• UX and mobile services
• Collaboration services

The SAP Analytics Cloud service will be offered by the second quarter of 2021.

The timely launch of the Korean data center aligns with the aggressive campaign for RISE with SAP, the German enterprise’s latest Business Transformation as a Service offering. The new comprehensive, intelligent, customer-specific offering enables a holistic digital transformation that goes beyond performing a technical migration to the cloud or adopting a new technology to propel businesses’ journey to an intelligent enterprise.

RISE with SAP leverages SAP solutions such as the next-generation, intelligent ERP business suite SAP S/4HANA Cloud and the platform for the Intelligent Enterprise SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). SAP BTP delivers one semantic layer across an enterprise, providing the foundation for a holistic business transformation.

SAP Korea stated that it leverages the infrastructure advantages of a Hyperscaler as well as business content and dozens of platform services that are built into SAP BTP. By leveraging SAP BTP, local consulting and system integration (SI) companies can develop SAP industry cloud services and provide service-type cloud (SaaS) to global SAP customers.

Running SAP Data Center

In recent years, there has been a remarkable increase in the use and popularity of data centers to address the growing demand for cloud solution services. For SAP data centers, successful operations strongly depend on the robust design of every individual component and in the redundancy of critical components to ensure SAP and its customers are guaranteed access to secured data.

The critical components based on SAP’s data center in St. Leon-Rot, Germany are:

• Power Supply. The data center is connected to two separate grid sectors operated by the local utility company. If one sector were to fail, then the second one will ensure that power is still supplied. In addition, it also has 13 diesel generators, which are housed in a separate building.
• Cooling. Electronic components, especially the processors, generate heat when in operation. If it is not dissipated, a processor’s efficiency decreases, in extreme cases, to the point that the component could fail. Therefore, cooling is essential for data center operations.
• Controlled Access. Access to the data center is allowed only for a limited number of authorized individuals. Entry is possible only through single-person access and mantrap systems. Freight can be brought into the data center using a special freight lock.

In addition to a well-constructed “hardened” building that houses servers, storage devices, cables, a connection to the Internet, SAP implements rigorous measures to ensure mission-critical applications housed in its 59 data centers around the world are uninterrupted.

• Secure Operations. SAP protects its data centers by regularly checking smooth operations of technology and infrastructure. Whether fire, data breach, or hardware defect, SAP data centers are protected against many hazards.
• Certified Security. The company regularly undergoes internal and external audits and reviews of its policies and controls, including data security and data protection regulations worldwide.
• Optimized Value. Data centers run efficiently with the help of improved hardware use, simplified interfaces, and uninterrupted operations. Technologies such as virtualization,multi-tenancy, and adaptive computing play a critical role in providing cloud services.
• Zero Emissions. SAP is able to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions in the data centers globally by practicing energy efficiency and procurement of electricity

The post SAP Data Center in Korea Opens to Drive the Intelligent Enterprise appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.