A fragrance company

fashions real-time insights

on business and sales with
SAP HANA
Submitted by: Chirag M Shinde
12030241070

CONTENTS
1.

Introduction.........................................................................................................................................3

2.

Business Needs....................................................................................................................................3

3.

Solution...............................................................................................................................................3

4.

Implementations..................................................................................................................................3

5.

Benefits................................................................................................................................................5

6.

Analysis and Reporting........................................................................................................................5

7.

Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................6

1. Introduction
This particular fragrance company owns a number of European fashion brands. SAP software is the
strategic application software in use at the company. It supports around 70% of the companys business
processes with outstanding transactional and reporting solutions. Also, it provides the platform for
supporting a common operating model worldwide with robust processes that can be tailored to the
companys exact needs. Best-of-breed applications are also deployed for specific business areas.

2. Business Needs
A European fragrance and fashion company wanted to optimize its business intelligence and reporting
performance, increasing flexibility and analytical capabilities. The company wanted to analyze its
transaction data in order to obtain information from data available not only in the transactional system but
also from other sources.

3.

Solution

The company implemented the IBM Systems solution for SAP HANA, and deployed two appliances
based on IBM System x3690 X5 servers, powered by Intel Xeon E7-2870 processors.

4. Implementations

The company wanted to analyze its transaction data in order to obtain information from data available
not only in the transactional system but also from other sources. For that purpose, the company selected
SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) and Oracle database. With the growth in business workload,
system performance was not acceptable. It took too much time to run reports and execute queries despite
the efforts made to optimize the current business intelligence platform.
Accortding to the companys Manager of Business Intelligence , Every time they made a data query
within areas of interest sales, financial results, inventory turns the response times was excessively
long. The severe delays in generating final reports prevented the business from using the BI platform
effectively.
Due to these performance issues, the level of use of analytics was much lower than optimal. The
information model was perfectly well designed, with unique one-source data and all the information
needed, but the performance stopped users from getting the maximum benefit from it.
They were spending considerable amounts of time in adjusting the platform by creating more and more
data aggregates to solve the business information needs, instead of thinking of new and possible addedvalue reporting capabilities.

Boosting business intelligence with SAP HANA

To obtain faster and more added-value analytical capabilities, the company decided to implement the SAP
HANA database, the in-memory solution for immediate business analytics.
SAP HANA software has been implemented to solve performance challenges. The information
requirements are well defined and properly deployed worldwide, but the sheer volume of data meant that
reporting was very slow. In further deployment phases rethinking of the analytical capabilities that SAP
HANA can provide to the business, such as online and batch processing, and the incorporation of more
internal and external data sources.
They uploaded enormous volumes of data every night into SAP HANA, in order to have up-to-date and
accurate information in the morning, so that they can perform analysis and create reports based on realtime insights. The SAP HANA solution is sold as an appliance, with the software and hardware offered as
a package in a series of set sizes depending on the data volumes. The company selected the IBM Systems
solution for SAP HANA, based on the IBM System x 3690 X5 Workload Optimized Solution. The
company also implemented a second system at a remote site for test and development purposes.
An overwhelming support from IBM and superb IBM System x3690 X5 server allowed them to
maximize investment in the SAP HANA software and fully integrate it with our existing IT infrastructure
They chose the IBM Systems solution for SAP HANA because of the close collaboration between IBM
and SAP, and because of the IBM teams genuine interest in the project. The IBM really shared the ideas
and was committed to meeting technical and business requirements to the fullest.
IBM Systems solution for SAP HANA
The IBM System x 3690 X5 Workload Optimized server is equipped with two powerful and reliable Intel
Xeon E7-2870 processors with ten cores each. These top-of-the-line processors deliver performance
designed to handle data-demanding workloads with improved scalability and increased memory and I/O
capacity.
The Intel processors deliver performance that is ideal for SAP HANA and offer improved scalability
along with increased memory and I/O capacity, which is critical for SAP HANA. Advanced reliability and
security features work to maintain data integrity, accelerate encrypted transactions and maximize the
availability of applications powered by SAP HANA.
In addition to the Intel processors, the x3950 X5 Workload Optimized Solution for SAP HANA includes
enterprise-class reliability and availability features to provide maximum up-time for applications powered
by SAP HANA and IBM eXFlash. IBM eXFlash helps optimize I/O performance for software such as
SAP HANA by integrating SSDs in the server. If business needs increase, the IBM offering provides a
pay-as-you-go approach that simplifies the process of scaling up. This attractive feature preserves the
initial server investment by adding capacity to the original configuration through the addition of server
nodes.
The unique, highly scalable IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) is deployed on all IBM systems for
SAP HANA, enabling high-performance SSD and disk access and the capability to implement highavailability solutions using GPFS replication and a seamless cluster extension.No storage area network
(SAN) is required and the database capacity can be expanded by adding nodes.

SAP has certified the integration of the IBM Systems solution for SAP HANA. It can have up to 16 IBM
System x3950 X5 nodes, delivering a total of 8 TB of capacity, and larger clusters can be submitted for
integration certification on request.
Business and IT efficiency
As a continuing user of the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component, the
company runs selected business intelligence infocubes based on data coming from both the relational
database and directly from SAP HANA. This approach enables the company to allocate workload to the
most appropriate software and reduce the complexity of the work environment for SAP NetWeaver BW.
Ultimately, the companys IT team expects to transfer the entire business intelligence workload down to
the SAP HANA platform, for reasons of performance. Advanced data compression technology included in
SAP HANA means that the original database size of 1.4 TB was cut to around 150 GB when stored in
SAP HANA, a reduction of around 90 percent. This reduces the need for expensive high-speed disk
storage, cuts data backup times and lowers total data storage costs.
Data for analysis using SAP HANA is extracted from a broad range of SAP software, including sales
demand, materials management, quality management and business planning and consolidation
functionality. Data can also be extracted from the SAP Extended Warehouse Management application, the
SAP ERP Human Capital Management solution and the SAP Customer Relationship Management. Other
vendor solutions, for supply chain, replenishment, product lifecycle management and logistics, also
contribute data to SAP HANA, enabling the company to gain an end-to-end view of operations at any
moment.

5. Benefits
The company uses SAP HANA to generate daily reports up to 500 times faster, as well as gain more
analytical capabilities. Based on the new insight available from SAP HANA, the company is moving the
reporting to a new stage, providing further drill down and analytical scope potentially extending the
capability to mobile devices. Advanced data compression features in SAP HANA and IBM Systems
servers have reduced the data volumes held by SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse component from 1.4
TB to 150 GB, a reduction of around 90 percent.

6. Analysis and Reporting

The innovative capabilities offered by the IBM Systems solution for SAP HANA have helped the
company to produce daily reports up to 500 times faster than before, and cut the elapsed time for data
uploading by nearly 30 percent. The company continues to run SAP NetWeaver BW alongside the SAP
HANA platform, making it simple to compare performance by launching the same query in both software
landscapes. The final landscape will only use SAP NetWeaver BW on the SAP HANA database.
The companys manager of Business Intelligence exclaims as the results show that some report execution
tasks are up to 500 times faster. For example a report generated by SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence

software that took seven minutes in SAP NetWeaver BW was executed by SAP HANA in four seconds.
We have seen query navigation execution run up to 100 times faster, database access up to 180 times
faster, and OLAP calculations up to 20 times faster.
With the IBM Systems solution for SAP HANA, the company is able to integrate external data sources in
just 100 seconds. As a result, vital non-SAP-based data is now included in analyses of key business
processes, allowing management to make smarter decisions based on fuller information delivered in real
time.

7. Conclusion
The quality of the data obtained is excellent, and SAP HANA allows to develop advanced analytics
tools. They can do analytics on the fly and produce faultless and complex reports. Also, they are able,
through a step-by-step view of processes, to drill down to specific data points and obtain new insights into
our product trends, sales and financial results. They can do all of this on a daily basis and in considerably
less time than it used to take. This enables us to be more responsive and competitive than ever before.