HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

Applies to:
HANA 1.0, SAP ECC 6.0, EhP5 Oil & Gas or any older version of SAP IS-Oil & Gas solution

Summary
This whitepaper is a Proof of Concept of SAPs ground breaking In-Memory computing product HANA (HighPerformance Analytic Appliance) with the aim to show-case modeling complex business requirements in Oil
Aviation Business. An End to End Integration from the backbone ECC Oil & Gas system and other Point of
Sale systems into HANA are explained beginning with initial data loads and information modeling to
Microsoft Excel based reporting. The results of the POC were outstanding with HANA technology resulting in
lightening fast computation of time and resource heavy Strategic reports, while providing un-compromising
preciseness on the Operational reporting needs. Eventually summarizes how quicker business decisions and
Speed to Business are possible using HANA at any level of an organization.
Author:

Kiran Srirama

Company: SAP Netherlands BV

Created on: 01 July 2011

Author Bio
Kiran Srirama is a Principal Consultant the Business Transformation Services Group of
SAP Netherlands. With a special focus on HANA, this following POC was lead and
delivered using industry use-cases and work streams for SAP Oil & Gas. His
specializations include providing leadership and architectural consulting to SAP
customers on IS-Oil & Gas/Metals/Chemicals/Mining, ERP Sales and Distribution,
Materials management and Logistics execution

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

Table of Contents
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 3
HANA Overview .................................................................................................................................................. 4
Oil Aviation Business Overview .......................................................................................................................... 6
The Use-Case ..................................................................................................................................................... 7
Architecture ..................................................................................................................................................... 7
Org structure for the use-case ........................................................................................................................ 8
HANA Studio preview...................................................................................................................................... 8
Information modeling....................................................................................................................................... 9
Data-Loading into HANA ............................................................................................................................... 10
HANA Studio and Excel based reporting ...................................................................................................... 11
Summary........................................................................................................................................................... 13
Related Content ................................................................................................................................................ 14
Copyright........................................................................................................................................................... 15

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

Introduction
The facts and numbers around the aviation downstream business at Oil & Gas majors already say a lot.
Consider Oil companies selling fuels, lubricants and services at airports to the airline companies and other
related business and ground fleet, we are talking about business spanning across 90 countries about 1200
airports and fuelling an airplane on average every 15 seconds and recording about several millions of sales
orders annually. Such business relies on a vast infrastructure and varied demographics where aviation
business operates and different operating environments.
The challenges of last decade were to integrate such varied landscape and business into a central backbone
ERP instance (e.g.: SAP systems). Looking at several Oil companies and where they are with this, one can
more or less say this is now achieved and productive. Integrating more and more countries and airports
seamlessly into the SAP system is now not a challenge anymore for the IT within the company. However, as
the decision making relies more than ever on complex algorithms and larger data sets, ability to query and
retrieve information instantly is now the most critical challenge. The volume of data your organization has to
manage is growing exponentially but the time you have to make relevant data-based business decisions is
shrinking. The most desired aspects of a management report are to be Flexible, Precise, Fast, and
Granular where needed with pure Real-time capabilities.
Achieving all these attributes together in an entirety is simply not possible today. Decision-making and
management reporting has been primarily on data warehousing instances (such as SAP BW) with reporting
front ends such as Crystal reports, BW explorer and Excel along with several other tools.
Another aspect to consider is the new generation smart devices that are becoming more and more common.
Smart devices such as iPhone / iPad and other handhelds are now capable of running SAP front ends on
them and therefore are becoming much desirable channels for retrieving management reporting as well. In
order to support the short turnaround times for mobility based queries, a very fast backbone appliance is
required.
SAPs ground breaking In-Memory computing platform HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is
simply the right answer for these situations described above. This allows SAP to deliver a new, previously
unimaginable class of enterprise applications that combine high-volume transactions with real-time analytics
to dramatically improve data-intensive processes such as planning, forecasting and pricing optimization.
Such technology allows harnessing the possibilities of real-time data with SAP In-Memory Database. By
combining advances in data compression, columnar data store and in-memory computing technology, SAP
In-Memory Database is designed to power the next generation of enterprise data management.
In this whitepaper, I aim to demonstrate usage of HANA technology with a use case from Oil & Gas Aviation
business model. An overview to end-to-end scenario starting from Data loads to Analytical modeling to Excel
based reporting are demonstrated with excellent results achieved of about under 2 seconds to scan and
report summaries out from 1,2 million sales order records on a 500 GB In-Memory HANA appliance.

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

HANA Overview
HANA is an in-memory technology where data can be loaded into it from several sources like ERP, BW and
also third party systems. The data can be loaded using special column-store techniques which allow efficient
data retrieval, while the traditional Row stores are available as well.

The below shows an overview of HANA architecture and supporting front ends.

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

A bit deeper details on HANA architecture can be seen below with several layers and the actions under each
layer of the in-memory computing.

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

Oil Aviation Business Overview

Oil downstream business is characterized by sales and distribution of fuels, lubricants, bitumen and services
to several customers across different lines of business such as aviation, marine and commercial and retail
customers. Considering Aviation alone, the business volumes looks like depicted below. We are talking
about business spanning across 90 countries about 1200 airports and fuelling an airplane on average every
15 seconds and recording about several millions of sales orders annually. Such business relies on a vast
infrastructure and varied demographics where aviation business operates and different operating
environments.

The pain points of todays IT architecture are mainly around inability of real-time decision making and very
long times to wait for making meaningful and critical decisions. Consider a case where as a management
team of an Oil company, you like to review whether doing business at a certain airport and country and
certain products are profitable anymore. You would like to look at several aspects such as which customers
are picking up, what products, how much, which period of year is more profitable and so on, and all very
quickly. Consider another case where you like to settle disputes with an airport operator and offer him same
day dispute resolution, which can add a lot of brand value to the company.

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

The Use-Case
Architecture
HANA can receive data from the ECC/IS-OIL backbone and/or the BW systems and also the POS system
can be interfaced where needed. Using the HANA inbuilt Studio, information modeling can be performed.
The reporting is then much quicker and possible to transfer it to several devices and using reporting tools.
In this use-case, the aim is to build two reports on HANA which will read enormous volumes of data and to
see how Flexibility, Preciseness, Speed and Granular where needed can be demonstrated.

Aviation performance reporting

o Sales orders read and analyzed per customer, per product, per period, per airport.
o Key strategic decisions can be taken with access to granular data where required.
o Strategic report

Dispute resolution report.

o Sales orders analyzed for disputes against the received POS data.
o Volumes in errors are detected quickly and disputes resolution initiated.
o Operational report

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

Org structure for the use-case

The following depicts the organizational structure designed especially for this use-case.
The Oil downstream business operates in three countries and at three airports selling to three different
airliners. The products being sold are Fuels, Lubricants and Services:

HANA Studio preview

To execute the use-case modelling a HANA 1.0 system with 500 GB of main memory was used. HANA
Studio is a built in modelling tool thats provided with HANA appliance. Here is a quick preview of how it
looks.

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

Information modeling
Information Modeling was done using HANA studio.

The analytical view depicted above shows that the key figures such as net volume, value can be reported
with several characteristics such as period, airport, product and customer.

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

Data-Loading into HANA

Data Loads into HANA column store can be done
a) Via Initial Data loads using CSV files
b) Via Data Services
c) Via Sybase replication Services (in real-time!)

Data loading can occur from CSV with the following statements:

HANA offers parallel thread based data loading for which incredible speeds have been seen.
For instance, about 1,02 million records were loaded in under 90 seconds into the main memory using this
mechanism.

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

HANA Studio and Excel based reporting

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

Summary
HANA is an emerging technology and is promising.

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

Related Content
1. SAP In-Memory document from Hasso Plattner Institute
2. SAP In-Memory computing
3. SAP HANA

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HANA for Oil & Gas Industry

Copyright
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