A five-year-old challenge for Anglo Platinum in running SAP-based management reports in under 25 minutes for its human resources and financial divisions was resolved in an implementation by Britehouse, of SAP Business Warehouse (BW) Accelerator. The time now taken to produce reports from a combined 300 million lines of data is less than 10 seconds.
The SAP BW Accelerator appliance allows data to be held in memory instead of being read off a hard drive, massively reducing the time needed to resolve online analytical processing (OLAP) queries.
Shawn Fisher, Anglo Platinum's head of information management, says the results of the project “have been pretty astounding. Five years ago, we embarked on a simplification of our ERP landscape, reducing nine instances of SAP to a single, integrated version. At the end of 2006, we implemented SAP BW, in order to extract information from our SAP systems for analysis of, say, the 1.2 million employee clock times that accumulate every three days.
“At that stage, our databases were relatively small and BW could handle the volumes. Then, it began to run out of space. Reports started taking an impractically long time to generate. Sometimes the system would simply time out. Often, it fell over during the nightly batch runs.
“Accelerator has eliminated all those problems - and finance and HR say it's the best thing IT has ever done for them.”
Anglo Platinum senior manager business improvement, Dolf Broodryk, says the success of the Accelerator project has caused the business to move more of its management reporting to SAP BW. “Because we've seen what it's capable of, we're asking it to do even more.”
Britehouse acting programme manager for Anglo Platinum, Paul Blignaut, says that an Accelerator implementation can be done in a month. “In this case, because Accelerator requires high-end servers that must be specially configured for it, we had to wait for the relevant HP factory to complete a move to the Czech Republic before we could import and then install the infrastructure. Also, we needed to wait for a lull for Anglo Platinum's database, in December, to add the extra power needed and do the cutover for the new system.
“Initially, however, we borrowed infrastructure in order to do a proof of concept. This was so successful that Anglo Platinum's HR and finance divisions wouldn't let us take it out until the bespoke system had arrived.”
From a big-picture perspective, Blignaut believes that organisations lose considerable value in relation to their overall systems because of the inability of users to get the speed of usage that makes it worth their while to use their part of the system.
“It doesn't matter how sophisticated the back-end is; if performance at the front-end is lacking, the 20% you save on budget upfront by, for instance, not implementing Accelerator (or SAP Hana, as it's now called) with SAP BW, will be offset by far bigger productivity losses and the inability to make real-time business decisions.
“Also, if users don't see value in your new system, then change management becomes virtually impossible. It's worth spending that extra 20% upfront to help you sell a new system to users.”
Broodryk says that one of the crucial roles Britehouse played for Anglo Platinum in the Accelerator project was articulating the business need and interpreting it for IT - and then putting the technical solution on the table. “Their understanding of how IT should serve the business gave us clarity on the way forward.”
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