Application case 3.

3 (Taken from Sharda Et al 2018)

Use of Teradata Analytics for SAP Solutions Accelerates Big Data Delivery

The company being profiled within this case study is a privately held Dutch retailer with 2,800
stores across several European countries. This retailer has 15 different brands that include products
from toys to cookware, each brand having its own infrastructure. Each business entity is managed
independently as one of 15 individual companies in the way they develop their processes, maintain
their legacy systems, and make business decisions across finance, IT, supply chain, and general
operations.

Background Meeting the needs of a constantly evolving competitive environment requires global
business visibility, which is a challenge for this large retailer with 15 independent brands to
manage. To gain better visibility, increase business efficiencies, and lower costs, the retailer
decided to develop a corporate strategy to manage data in a centralized system using a single IT
department. Data centralization means that all brands will be managed within a single data ware-
house and implemented brand by brand to consider individual business processes and needs. A big
challenge for this large retailer is that several systems must be integrated, including their (15) SAP
ERPs, warehouse management systems, point-of-sale (POS) systems, and materials master data.
With a focus on maintaining business agility for sales and margin analysis, the retailer’s goal was
to provide access to the transactional level of data originating from the roughly 50 SAP tables
within each ERP system. The move to a centralized approach was especially exacerbated by the
complexity and nuances across the 15 ERP instances. Work was estimated at 400 days of effort
per source system to bring this data into their central warehouse. Consequently, they needed a way
to justify their expenditure, develop an ongoing value proposition of their data warehouse
approach, and develop a way to expedite this process.

Product Acquisition Story On the business side, the focus is on creating a centralized analytic
platform with access to a global view of transactional data. Due to the seasonal nature of retail,
being able to leverage multiple years of data is important to help identify seasonal trends, create
forecasts, and develop pricing and promotions. The goal is to improve visibility and provide
freedom of analytics across their supply chain, materials, sales, and marketing to help this
organization become more efficient in the way it does business. Consequently, the retailer selected
the Teradata Database because it could handle both the transactional analytics in addition to
providing advanced analytics capabilities. Their goal was to support operational analytics and
flexibility by loading data without developing DMs or other logical models in advance of users
asking business questions. This approach enables them to save data centrally within a Teradata
Database while providing future flexibility related to data access, reports, and analytics for all the
brands.

Underestimating the complexities of SAP ERP, the company spent the first 6 months cutting their
teeth on a customer homegrown SAP integration. After 6 months with little to show, they
recognized the risks and stopped the project to investigate if there were better approaches to this
problem. They first met with a major SAP SI, who provided a 400- day integration estimate to
load data from just the first SAP ERP system. This would not provide value fast enough, so the
retailer escalated the issue and investigated a new Teradata solution used to auto-mate the data
acquisition processes when using SAP ERP. Teradata Analytics for SAP Solutions was selected
because it was specifically designed to address the challenges associated with bringing data in
from SAP ERP to the Teradata Database. The solu- tion also delivers an automated approach to
integrating SAP ERP data into the data warehouse and enabled them to load the data required for
the first brand in just 5 days instead of the estimated 400. The retailer spent an additional 45 days
adding 25 custom (Z) tables and preparing the data for consumption. This accelerated the
integration of SAP data by 800%, thereby saving 350 days of work.
Combining a full ERP consolidation project across several legacy systems creates a project with
many complexities. Although Teradata Analytics for SAP Solutions provided automation for the
SAP-related data management portion of the project, the retailer still encountered technical
challenges since its data warehousing initiative was combined with a broader integration project.

Their approach was to standardize the tools and develop a framework with the first couple of
brands that could be applied to the incremental rollout to the rest of the organization.

First, they needed to standardize on an ETL tool and develop a new methodology and way of
leveraging ETL. They used the ETL tool as an Extract Load Transform (ELT) tool to maintain the
integrity of the granular transactional data. The retailer ended up choosing Informatica® as the
ETL standard and its ETL environment by using the ELT tool as just a data mover and job
scheduler.

Second, in addition to storing the atomic trans- actional data, the retailer was able to leverage the
Teradata platform to perform all its business transformations in-database when moving data into
the reporting environment. This approach allowed them to keep a copy of the granular transactions,
leverage the out-of-the box integrations provided within the Analytics for SAP Solutions to add
context to the SAP data, and harness the database power to apply other transformations and
analytics.

Third, high data quality was imperative for them. They wanted to ensure that data could be
accessed and managed in a consistent way. Material numbers highlight the importance of data
govern- ance to this retailer. Material numbers are structured differently across multiple systems
and historically would have been reconciled during the load/model process. In this new
architecture, they were able to easily overcome this challenge by creating unique material views
in the data warehouse to harmonize the material numbers for reporting.

Finally, they required an agile way to deliver data and analytics for both reports and ad hoc
analytical access, which could also meet the diverse requirements of the brands. By taking
advantage of Teradata partnerships with solution providers such as MicroStrategy®, the retailer
was able to access the granular data stored in the data warehouse while using the BI tools to apply
the relevant algorithms and leverage the flexibility designed into the data warehouse solution. The
development of the data warehouse as a centralized data access hub was challenging at first due to
the requirement to develop a new frame- work and the overall learning curve because of the change
in approach to data warehouse design. Luckily, once this framework was developed, integration
using Teradata Analytics for SAP Solutions was simple and repeatable. According to the architect
at the European retailer, “Teradata Analytics for SAP is a fast and flexible integrated solution,
offering lower project risk, faster development, an integrated semantic model, and direct access to
detailed data.”
Lessons Learned Overall, the retailer’s goal is to provide a repeatable implementation strategy
across their brands to enable better business decisions, improve business efficiencies, and lower
operating costs through IT centralization. Although they are still in the early phases of the project,
they have already learned from the implementation of integrating their first brand into the Teradata
data warehouse. Due to the retailer’s use of Teradata Analytics for SAP Solutions, they were able
to accelerate the time to value and simplify integration activities. In addition, they were able to
develop some of the following takeaways to apply to the integration of their subsequent brands
and to similar projects.
• Take the time for due diligence and learn what technologies/solutions exist to support
implementations. In this case, the retailer was able to take advantage of Teradata Analytics for
SAP Solutions, decreasing time to value and enabling it to focus on analytics as opposed to
integration.
• Develop a framework to enable repeatable processes that can address the complexities of the vast
amount of data and custom needs of the business.
Keep the system design as simple as possible to ensure technology and business adoption.
• Make sure to align technical decisions with the overall vision of enabling business agility.
• Develop a standard data governance approach to ensure data integrity that extends beyond the
implementation process so that business and technical users understand how they can apply data
for reports and analytics.
• Identify latency requirements to ensure that solutions—both data warehouse and integration
approach—support needs. This meant ensuring that the Teradata SAP Solution also supported their
operational needs.

These lessons learned apply to the broader implementation and use of Teradata Analytics for SAP.
The retailer was committed to centralizing their infrastructure and managing their brands more
effectively. Consequently, they were able to take advantage of a way to automate the process and
lessen time to value because of the ability to lever- age a targeted solution to tie their ERP solutions
to their analytics.

Questions for Discussion

1. What were the challenges faced by the large Dutch retailer?
2. What was the proposed multivendor solution? What were the implementation challenges?
3. What were the lessons learned?