SAP leveraging Hana for core of enterprise offerings

11th July 2014

By: Schalk Burger

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

  

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Enterprise resource planning giant SAP is using its in-memory computing technology, called Hana, as the core platform for all its enterprise offerings.

This includes extending the life of existing information technology (IT) infrastructure, providing cloud services and analytics, as well as simplifying and optimising clients’ IT environments, says SAP Europe, Middle East and Africa COO Darren Roos.

The Hana technology is a form of relational database management and column-orientated real-time analytics that can process transactional and analytics workloads simultaneously.

“The main benefit of SAP Hana is the ability to do real-time analytics and predictive modelling, which enable companies to improve their speed of operation and agility. Traditional reporting is retrospective, while the acme of data science is prediction,” says SAP Hana global VP Snehanshu Shah.

Further, the Hana system can also be deployed as a virtual machine and can thus be deployed in cloud or virtualised environments, he adds.

The visibility created by concurrent transaction processing and analytics enables companies to identify unknown bottlenecks and expenses.

Dispensary and health retail chain Dis-Chem used Hana to automate many of its financial process. It reduced its supplier reconciliation to 20 minutes from a full day, reduced the time to produce reports based on 20-million entries from three days to three hours and improved the speed with which it could produce reports to business queries hundredfold, says Dis-Chem IT and Projects executive Kim Sim.

“A key driver was Hana. The new and additional data enabled us to improve our client services and we are seeing significant benefits to our logistics from the enterprise warehouse management tool we implemented in May. We are implementing a second phase to the enterprise warehouse management system for fine picking and batch expiry management,” she says.

Predictions based on company data can also be augmented with additional data and correlations between data can be determined. This enables companies to include triggers, for example, identifying sales opportunities in real time. Such correlations can also be used to make the analytics performed prescriptive, enthuses Shah.

“Using this approach enables one to move into the realm of predicting unknown variables that can impact on the business. Prescriptive analysis is about what signals one can provide for the company to be more efficient, for example, creating rules, triggers, boundaries, warnings or parameters for business processes.”

The reasons for correlations are not always obvious, but companies should be able to take advantage of correlations when they are present and must change their approach when correlations change, which can only be done through real-time, detailed analytics, prediction and prescription, he adds.

A key approach is to ensure that high-quality data is analysed, rather than processing large amounts of poor-quality data, which has enabled 1 200 start-up enterprises using Hana to use the system effectively, notes Roos.

“The best way to deploy Hana in a company is to target the application that will provide the greatest reward first. Hana can be implemented quickly using the systems companies have in place and adding only the parts required to enable a full end-to-end in-memory analytics system,” concludes Shah.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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