Challenges 

The electronics manufacturer’s North America division used SAP and SAP Business Warehouse (BW) as their analytical and reporting tools for tracking sales, distribution, billing, and consignment accruals data. These tools helped with data analysis and reporting, but slow data processing and report generation required more time to provide the desired reports.  

Using SAP and SAP BW, they’re limited to refreshing data only once a day. They wanted a solution that: 

• Allowed them to auto-refresh data throughout the day without any lag  
• Required less processing time 
• Allowed custom-written code 
• Offered more real-time data analytics.  

To achieve this, they wanted to upgrade to more advanced cloud-based modern data analytics and reporting platform, helping them in self-service analytics and capabilities. 

Solutions 

Neal Analytics analyzed the complete scenario and decided to move their SAP and SAP BW data to the Azure platform. We replicated and rebuilt the data in Azure to showcase the capabilities of Azure data platform services and benchmark the performance. 

Working with the customer on a five-week DMIM (Data Modernization in a Month) project, our team examined the customer’s data and then built an Azure Data Factory pipeline to load data from their SAP sources to Azure Data Lake storage. 

From there, we built Azure Synapse based data models for sales, distribution, billing, and consignment accruals. Later, we created a self-service Power BI data model which they can create similar reports as they would create using the previous tools. 

Lastly, the customer’s team of experts performed the overall data validation against the SAP BW (S/4 HANA) data they had, finding excellent consistency. 

Results 

With Neal’s DMIM solution, they reduced data integration and orchestration time to enable faster and more robust insights.  

Now, the customer has more visibility into their data and monitoring the business has become easier, thanks to modern cloud-based data analytics and reporting platform. With the ability to auto-refresh data continuously throughout the day without any lag, their teams are empowered with the most up-to-date data for insights and reporting.