Large companies desire data freedom — the ability to access, manipulate and find insights from their data when and where they need to. Specifically, unlocking data from SAP systems can drive powerful insights related to optimizing manufacturing processes, tracking financial performance and holistic customer views. 

But SAP data, often stored in on-premises systems, can be difficult to extract due to complex configurations, security requirements and unique data types. With hundreds of tables, it’s hard to articulate which data points are valuable and how to synthesize the massive amounts of data for actionable insights.

Extracting the diverse areas of SAP data into a cloud data warehouse can enable data engineers to find insights and build dashboards. With Fivetran, organizations can embrace data freedom by quickly and reliably replicating data from SAP to a cloud-based repository for analytics and business insights — without extensive development. 

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Centralizing SAP data with Fivetran

The Fivetran platform reliably and securely integrates large volumes of data from over 500 sources, including SAP and many other common ERP systems into the cloud based destination. With a low-impact, change data capture solution, Fivetran can quickly and efficiently replicate data from a variety of SAP configurations including SAP ECC on HANA, Oracle, SQL Server, or Db2 and S/4HANA into an extensive list of cloud data warehouses, data lakes and databases. Fivetran also offers capabilities to support the NetWeaver application layer. Fivetran’s ability to extract data from multiple complex ERP systems, like SAP and Oracle, and SaaS applications, such as Salesforce and Workday, creates a unique opportunity for business analysis. 

The cloud destination provides an efficient storage solution for large volumes of data with the opportunity to take advantage of numerous reporting, dashboarding and analytics tools for further insights on the data. Freely using data to find insights and build dashboards can be very lucrative to enterprises trying to improve their bottom line.

Pitney Bowes achieves real-time SAP analytics with Fivetran and Snowflake

Pitney Bowes, a global shipping and mailing company, lacked high-quality, real-time data they needed to make critical business decisions. Its Enterprise Information Management (EIM) team faced three challenges: siloed data, lack of scalability and inefficient tech spending. Employees tried to work around these constraints by pasting data into Excel spreadsheets for executive reporting and analytics — which often exacerbated the issues.

Data limitations were also causing downstream problems, like late-arriving packages that impacted SLA targets. They lacked the sophistication to detect delays and notify customers in time, causing reputational risk. The COVID pandemic magnified data challenges when online shopping increased tenfold — which meant a tenfold increase in parcel volume.

But moving to a cloud-based platform on Snowflake and Fivetran paid off quickly and eliminated multiple constraints. Fivetran performed full syncs of high-volume data to Snowflake in under seven hours, a 85% increase in performance. Now the team could sync at least four times a day with no performance impact on SAP systems. For the first time, they had efficient and real-time data delivery for all of our facilities, vehicles and parcels. Read the full case study. 

Empowering enterprises to embrace data freedom

Growing amounts of data locked away in on-premises SAP instances serve no value for business analysts if they’re unable to use this data for analytics and insights. Enterprises should be empowered to not only extract their data from large ERP systems but also derive extensive value from this data. Fivetran’s extensive SAP replication capabilities can power enterprises forward by effortlessly replicating data from SAP and a variety of other sources into cloud destinations for heightened business insights and powering innovation.

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