SAP HANA EFFECT Title: Episode 11 - Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at (Duration: 18:10) Publish Date: April 6, 2015 Description: Rita Lefler walks us through how has revolutionized their reporting infrastructure with a rapid Business Warehouse on HANA project. THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. Welcome to The HANA Effect. I m your host, Jeff Word, from SAP. Each week, we bring listeners the real stories of how companies are taking advantage of real-time computing to transform their organizations and let them share the lessons they ve learned along their journey. Welcome to another episode of The HANA Effect. I m your host, Jeff Word from SAP, and I m joined today by Rita Lefler from. Rita, welcome. Thank you. Before we get started, why don t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role I joined Tom s Shoes back in 2013 as a Global BI Director. 1
You guys have been working with HANA for a few months now. You ve had one really big HANA project. So, why don t you tell us a little bit about how got started working with Hana. Back in 2013, implemented SAP, but it was lacking of reporting, so business intelligence program wasn t completed at that time. So, when we start evaluating how to bring business intelligence in the company, how to make operational decisions in more efficient way, we were thinking about SAP BW. And we decided that we want to build BW on HANA. So, we constantly have this challenge in the business where we need to analyze data at a very detailed level and also be very agile with our analysis. We can t really build very static models. We re constantly changing the way we look at the product. We add new products and we thought HANA would actually deliver us this agility. So, basically, you wanted to look at an enterprise data warehouse but you needed the speed and capability from the HANA engine underneath it. We needed both. We needed HANA engine capability to give us speed, but we also needed agility, the BW model and making sure that we can really quickly address new business challenges or business questions without going 2
into the back end and changing our model. So, with HANA and specifically BW on HANA 7.4, there is simplified approach on the data modeling and a lot of layers got removed. So what we could do now, our time to market is a lot faster than it would be with traditional BW. That s actually very important, especially in your business that has all of these really critical issues that come up from a retail perspective. You have to be able to see those and react quickly. Yes. And it s not just from the retail perspective. It s also planning and forecasting and how do we buy? What models we have to invest in and from the operational perspective even from our own operations, we have to constantly look from the different angles. So many other questions too, so we want to know how the style is performing in the season, beginning of the season or how similar styles were performing last year but because we are not thorough footwear solution, so we don t have the same product selling every year, so we have new product, introduce seasonal product, and sometimes we have to look at them differently than they looked four months ago at the similar product. So, we need that agility to be able to produce different result and produce different models in our BW system. So, with HANA, BW on HANA, we have this ability. We can really quickly connect the data with new composite info providers and the ability to join the data on the fly, we speed up our delivery to the business. 3
So, it s not just about the speed and the flexibility of HANA, but it s about the speed and agility that the business users now have and the flexibility that they have to ask the questions and dig deeper to solve the business issues, yeah? Exactly. It s that agility and reducing that development lifetime. Can you give us an example of the before world and after world once you went to BW on HANA? In the before world, the traditional BW we would have really static model. So, we would load the delta into the SL layers, then we would create cubes and then we create multiple cubes on top of the DSO. So, each one would be aggregated at specific function so that the way that you would have, for example, dashboard, you would have specific cube attached to that dashboard for the performance and improved performance of running that. And then now you mentioned, when you have multiple cubes in the same actually data, so every time you want to change something in the underlying data, you have to either reload the data, you have to change all your transformation, you have to make sure all your cubes, everywhere that you have an impact in the chain have to be changed. And so, it s a long process to just make some small changes on the back end. So now, with BW on 4
HANA, first of all, we don t have cubes anymore. So, we have just one layer because it gives us the speed and then we now we have this agility to create virtual providers, which do not store any data. We can join the data virtually, so it s really easy to have just one layer where the data is stored and if it needs to be changed, it s changed in one place only, and then you virtually can actually produce results that you need for the business. Another benefit of HANA and speed is the data loads. So, if the data loads before would take 8 or 10 hours, now all our data loads take within 2 hours and certain info providers we can load within minutes. So, what does it do for business now? So, let s say we re in the month end close and users want to refresh the data during the day, we would never be able to do that before HANA. Now, we can say, hey, okay, we can refresh it to you. It takes a few minutes, no impact on the business, nobody really even notice anything and they can have data refreshed. So, saying that, we don t have real-time application. We don t have HANA get real-time data. But even with the DW, we re almost able to provide them near real-time results when they need it. So, it s on demand. We re able to refresh data on demand. That s a huge, huge shift from the nightly batch ETL and loading and things like that and then you come in in the next morning and massage and restructure and things like that before it s available. Now, you guys can do the actual physical import very, very 5
quickly, which allows you to spend most of your time on making the data more useful to the business, right? We still do nightly batch, preloads. And we want to keep data consistently through the day, so our loads are still nightly. They shortened, so now instead of 8-10 hours, so our window is like 2 hours. In addition to that, in this specific situation, it s just an exception and when user want the data to be refreshed in exception situation, we could do it really quick. Or, let s say, we have exception situation when data loads fail during the night and we come in the morning, 6 or 7 a.m. in the morning, and we re fixing that and we want to reload data, the data variable almost immediately after we fix. In the traditional BW without the HANA, users would probably experience some downtime because we would fix it and then they would have to wait for the load to complete. Let s talk a little bit about the size of this data problem that you ve got. Can you give us a little idea of what the size of your warehouse is today and kind of the data volumes that you re dealing with now on HANA? In HANA, currently we have 250 gigabytes. We re in the medium size HANA appliance, and we almost reach the max. So, we re thinking about implementing next either 6
near line storage and also upgrading to more HANA memory. Okay. So, you guys aren t really a big massive, big data problem. It s not necessarily that you have lots of data, it s just that you need the data quickly and needs to be flexible in order to do the types of analysis that your users want. So, again, we are medium size company. Tell us a little bit, if you can, about the project when you rolled out BW on HANA, a little bit about the resources and the types of activities and then maybe also how long it took and some of the interesting things you found out during the process. So, we have started our project migrating on HANA beginning of 2014, and our challenge was that we wanted to migrate our existing BW system on HANA but also bring up and develop a new content, and we had a specific deadline for the new content. So, we needed our plan to flow with migration and development and meet our deadline. So, the way we decided to do that because we couldn t freeze our development environment for too long, we have installed HANA on sandbox. And we spent about a month to migrating on the sandbox and testing. And so, the challenges we experienced at that time is that BW on HANA was so new and the support pack was lower than we 7
needed. And so, we basically spent a little bit more time to get into the highest support pack. And so, the recommendation for anybody who would go through the same route, before you do it, you have to be on the latest, latest support pack for BW on HANA. That s really good advice and something also SAP highly recommends. Can you give us an idea of how long the project took? It took us to do all the testing in the sandbox and play in the sandbox and making sure all our migration is successful and all our reports are tested in a sandbox. And then when we brought development down for the migration, it took us two weeks for the full HANA migration, development, and QA boxes including the testing. The special focus was given to digression testing. And, in this period, the migration itself would take only two days, but the testing is where all the time spent. So we have to test all the reports, the data loads, and change management, moving objects from development to key, which was really important and object development. So, you could find some issues where your reports are okay, but when you re trying to move BW object from one environment to another environment, you might have some problems. And we found a couple nodes to fix that. So, after the two weeks, we just have to wait for the right time to move the production. We actually did the production migration to HANA over the weekend. And to all 8
the users, it was treated like just a normal system upgrade. So, we never run in the parallel environment. We only had production unavailable for the weekend Saturday and Sunday, but you also have to consider that our database size was not as high at that time and the development was frozen only for two weeks. This is what it took us to get from development to QA and tested. So about resources, all it s been done in small team was one internal resource and two consultants and within those two consultants, we also were developing new content. So, it wasn t just a HANA migration but we also were doing data modeling, and building in development new data models. So, this was a pretty bare bones team that did a huge amount of effort in a very short amount of time. Yes, so that s the BW team. We had another team for IT, who are hosting our hardware. And so, we had the team there that was the basis and database team who actually were doing database migration. So, what kind of things can you tell us that may have been surprising to the team as you guys were going through that project? A couple of things were surprising. Yeah, so we kind of had some setbacks because we needed to do upgrade to the different support pack. So, we had to go through upgrade 9
to support pack and we were at 740 first, before you do the migration. So, we had to actually go and upgrade all landscape to support pack. And then later on, we found out that we need higher support pack. So, we had to go through the whole upgrade again. But I don t think this is going to be a problem now; it s been because BW on HANA was too new at that time. I think now you could safely go on the way to support pack once and then do your migration as a second step. So, the other surprises was after we went with BW on HANA is learning how HANA database works and how memory allocation works. And so, your basis team would have to do a good job to actually make sure it s all set up properly. And they re also making sure that you do the system clean up prior going to BW on HANA, making sure that your tables maintain only the data that you need, so making sure that all the log files are clean and PSA clean and keep it clean so you don t get data that s not needed in the system. Also making sure that what s stored in the column store, table, sources store tables, so all this has to be taken into consideration for better performance and better use of the appliance that you have. That s really, really good advice and I might also add that since the time that even you guys went live, there s been a huge additional development in the cookbook for advice for going through these projects and preparing for them. So, for listeners that are 10
interested in this, there s a whole page on that on the SAP community on SCN. That is a great place to start to get ahead learning about these things. So, let s move onto a little bit more now that you guys have got this up and running. It s been going for a while. Where do you guys see TOMS next evolutionary steps in the HANA world? So, now, when we re on HANA, this is just the beginning and so in our evolution now, we want to get more into the visualization and business intelligence. So, we re installing Lumiere right now and we re playing with Lumiere and how we can start telling our data discovery story through the Lumiere and visualization and having users to actually explore the data through ability of fast on the HANA database. So, going way beyond just the standard reporting into visualizations and other really high value added data discovery? Yes. So, we re going into data discovery and we enable faster time to insight analysis and accelerating decision making. We also know that we have ability to replace some complex data model with new ability with built in composite info provides and so, we re taking full advantage of that. Next thing we also want to do, we want to have some insights and real-time and we can build 11
some data model on HANA that will be independent from BW schema. Okay. That s phenomenal. What are you guys planning on the more transactional side with ERP? With ERP, we would like to build some analysis, especially for the finance and it seems like we got a lot of requests from finance during the month end close when they analyzed the data and the line items and they needed this at real-time. So, we would build some financial reporting with the deep dive analysis for finance as a first step. Then we could see the customer analytics, so when we can connect to our e-commerce database and run some customer analytics and 360 degree customer view. That would be really impactful. So, any other words of wisdom you d like to share with other companies that are considering going down the BW on HANA route? Yeah, I m glad you mentioned the cookbook because we actually use that cookbook and it was really, really helpful. So, that s something that should not be ignored. The team experience is invaluable, especially basis team experience because the way the HANA database is managed is different from other traditional databases. So, you want somebody who has experience and can help you get through that and through the system migration. Insure the 12
hands off and the specific abilities are understood between infrastructure or basis or BW team because even if you look at the cookbook, there are different steps are done by different functional group. Some of them have to be done by BW team and some of the basis and some of the infrastructure. So, that needs to be clearly understood before you start your implementation. No, that s absolutely critical and very, very good advice for the folks considering this. I want to say, first of all, thank you so much, Rita, for joining us today. This has been phenomenal. You re welcome. It s my pleasure. Thanks for having me here. And for everyone listening, we ll put some more information about this on the blog at hana.sap.com. You can always find out more information there and make sure to follow us on itunes and Soundcloud, so that you can continue to get more great stories from wonderful adopters of SAP HANA. So, thank you very much again, Rita, for joining us today and we wish a phenomenal success in the future not only becoming a great company but also doing a lot of great stuff to make the world a little bit better place. So, thank you very much. Thank you. 13