ENABLING OPERATIONAL BI

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Author: Eric Kavanagh, The Bloor Group Co-Founder

Satisfy the need for speed with

real-time data replication

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The Data Challenge to Make Faster, More Informed Decisions

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The Usual Path

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Need for Speed

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What Users Really Want

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Replicating for Faster Value

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The Data Challenge to Make Faster, More Informed Decisions

People want answers. Successful businesses understand this, which is why they support the information needs of their workers to access the information they need to do their jobs, primarily via dashboards, reports, and other analysis tools. Most of these solutions fall into the category of traditional business intelligence (BI), which is now a mature discipline that relies heavily on data warehousing (DW) and data integration (DI).

While the benefits of this approach are well documented, there are many time-sensitive use cases that call for a complementary or alternative information delivery strategy. This is especially true when dealing with data from SAP and other ERP systems. In this paper, we’ll explore the potential of using data replication technology for delivering operational BI capabilities to organizations that use SAP.

The Usual Path

Most businesses take one of two approaches when trying to deliver BI capabilities with SAP data. Either they 1) use SAP’s own solution, the Business Warehouse, commonly called SAP BW or 2) build a custom enterprise data warehouse (EDW). These approaches can use any number of DI technologies coupled with data visualization tools and a variety of online analytical processing (OLAP) solutions.

While the data warehouse is a necessary piece of infrastructure, key to enabling enterprise-class business intelligence, its implementation comes with some inherent challenges. With either BW or an EDW, enterprises face significant cost, time, and human resource investments required for development and on-going maintenance.

In terms of time, few BW implementations can be accomplished inside of several months. This is usually due to scheduling issues, but also because of the raw time it takes to map out necessary data elements, profile the results, build and test the applications. As for staffing, the political and financial dynamics of most organizations only allow for a handful of specialized personnel.

Need for Speed

There is a second element to the speed equation – the time it takes to get the data you need. Most BI solutions are focused on helping business leaders with decisions that are made on a weekly, monthly, or even quarterly basis. These are important decisions, but they are much different than the kinds of operational choices that front-line workers must make on a daily, even moment-to-moment basis. Examples include:

• Call center workers who need up-to-the-minute details on what a customer has experienced

• Plant managers who need real-time data to keep operations rolling

• Pharmaceutical executives who face an array of legal and compliance-related issues that can change any time

• Retailers who will benefit greatly from knowing which products are selling where and for how much.

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Most DW solutions refresh daily, some weekly. These operational use cases call for data to be delivered much faster, in real or near-real time. Such information needs cannot be solved with the traditional approach, at least not without significant cost and labor. These are the kinds of scenarios that call for data replication, a mature technique enabled by new approaches.

What Users Really Want

Beyond the need for timely information, users can never have all the reports they need. The business environment keeps changing, and new reports and analytics are always required. Users want and need to view information differently, without waiting a long time to have it. From a functional perspective, this means that most IT groups must either disappoint their users or find creative ways to support a host of solutions. The ideal scenario involves the proverbial (if elusive) self-service BI. In this type of an environment, end users can quickly build and use analytical applications that can access the data they need, when they need it, and with minimal IT support.

Replicating for Faster Value

Today, customers around the world adopted operational data replication as a way to satisfy business requirements, using it to complement their SAP BW or EDW. For example, Attunity customers are using granular, log-based data replication solutions to deliver real-time

transactional data to analytical solutions that augment or supplant traditional applications. The recipe usually includes creation of an operational reporting database that is populated by frequent or real-time updates from SAP systems. Users can run real-time queries against this database to get timely data without any impact to the SAP source system.

The replication technology taps into the native logging facility of the underlying database (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server) to get the most recent SAP transactions without causing any impedance on production systems. In practice, the data that drives operational decision making is contained in a small fraction of tables in the SAP database. Streaming only real-time transactions from the tables needed results in a very lean, swift movement of critical data to feed end-user applications and BI tools. This type of configuration allows customers to reduce the significant load placed on SAP by read-only query operations such as reporting and improves SAP performance levels.

Perhaps most importantly from the user perspective, this approach delivers the required data to any kind of front-end solution, whether it’s SAP/Business Objects or any of the dozens of reporting and business intelligence packages available from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and many others. This helps to reduce the burden on IT staff, as users can rely on the tools of their choice. It also greatly increases productivity for that very same reason.

Key Benefits

The key benefits of using data replication to improve real-time SAP reporting include the following:

• Reduce the direct reporting load on SAP source systems

• Simplify the production of reports and analytical applications • Exchange real-time data with other operational source systems • Provide an alternative technique for updating parts of a warehouse

• Relieve burdens on DBAs, SAP experts and other data management professionals • Lower TCO if used to replace traditional applications

Customer Examples

Although this approach is relatively novel, there are a number of innovative solutions already in place. One global manufacturing company requires real-time updates on a range of

materials. The Chief Architect knew where the data was and needed an application that could provide a synchronized reporting database showing part shortages, stock outs, and new orders.

Using Attunity’s replication technology, it is now able to stream real-time data from critical SAP tables to a synchronized SQL Server database that hosts live reports using Microsoft Reporting Services. After a couple weeks of implementation, the IT department was able to deliver what the end users needed in a fraction of the time normally expected with this type of project.

In another case, a major pharmaceutical company had a dire need to consolidate product data marts and to synchronize them with live, operational data in its source systems. It had

already invested in the full complement of SAP reporting solutions and also had an array of messaging technologies and other components of a robust information architecture. The main issues were time-to-deployment and compatibility with the existing SAP Data Services ETL. The organization’s IT management began searching for alternative solutions to reduce cost and complexity. After evaluating potential solutions, they found the open, standards-based solution from Attunity to be the most affordable and flexible for their needs.

This sample solution combines SAP’s data integration software, SAP/BusinessObjects Data Services, with Attunity Stream CDC (change data capture) to perform real-time

transformations of the streaming data as it is processed from source to target. Because the data feeds are highly granular and grab information from log files using CDC, the speed of delivery is fast, and there’s no impact on production systems. The performance has been so good that internal SAP experts are now singing praises instead of raising concerns.

Conclusion

Operational data replication offers a valuable solution for SAP customers seeking more

efficient ways to satisfy demands for timely information, faster times for creating new reports, lowering dependency on IT resources, and empowering users with self-service BI. Software such as Attunity’s real-time data replication provides a non-intrusive method for

synchronizing SAP with operational reporting and business intelligence solutions in a fraction of the time and costs, compared to traditional solutions.

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About Attunity

Attunity is a leading provider of real-time data integration and event-capture software. Using our software, companies can seamlessly connect, transfer and join, to and from, virtually any data source. By quickly identifying critical changes in real-time, professionals can leverage data for use in critical applications including business intelligence, reporting and beyond. Learn more at www.Attunity.com or call (781) 328-0960 or (866) 288-8648.

The Bloor Group is a consulting, research, and analyst firm that focuses on open research and the use of modern media to gather knowledge and disseminate it to IT users. The firm’s current focus is primarily in the areas of business intelligence, database, IT security, SOA and information management. Visit www.TheBloorGroup.com and www.TheVirtualCircle.com