aifora GmbH
Customer & challenge
The Düsseldorf software company aifora offers retailers the opportunity to intelligently control their price and inventory management across
channels using various SaaS solutions on its data sharing and AI platform and thus to noticeably increase sales, turnover and earnings as well as
to reduce inventory levels. Learn more at: www.aifora.de.
Aifora’s cloud-based retail automation platform uses data from retailers to predict purchasing behaviour with the help of self learning algorithms, thereby optimizing and automating inventory management and pricing. Aifora was faced with the challenge of transferring the transaction and item master data of a shoe retailer from its SAP system to the data sharing and AI platform. The company had been searching for a “ready-to-use” solution that it could use to reliably transfer the raw data to Amazon S3 Data Lake, where it would then be historized and loaded into the ETL pipeline.
“Xtract Universal offers us a very simple and efficient way to securely and reliably integrate our customers’ SAP data into our data sharing and AI platform.”
David Krings, CTO and co-founder of aifora GmbH
Solution with Xtract Universal
David Krings, CTO and co-founder of aifora, reported: “We configured a VPN side-to-side connection to our customer, and then we first conducted a data transfer test with the free test license from Xtract Universal. The test worked perfectly, so then we put the solution into live operation. Implementation took only a couple of days.” According to the CTO, there was a support issue at the beginning: “Sometimes there are timeouts when retrieving data from SAP. To prevent this, Xtract Universal offers the option of setting a slicing variable that ensures that only certain data blocks are transferred. To do this, we needed the assistance of Theobald Software Support, who really gave us very quick and professional support.”
Challenge
Integrating data from the SAP system at a retail
company into the aifora retail automation platform.
Added value
Automatic daily data transfers between SAP and
Amazon S3 Data Lake.
Once a day, the retailer’s SAP data is transferred to the aifora cloud platform using Xtract Universal via an Amazon S3 Data Lake. Mathematical algorithms use this and other external data to calculate forecasts of customer demand per item and location. David Krings concluded: “Retailers need to be able to react very quickly to changes in demand for inventory and price adjustments. The coronavirus pandemic has also increased the pressure on retailers. Our solution offers our customers an instrument for continuously optimizing product availability and pricing. Xtract Universal guarantees that valuable customer data will reliably find its way from SAP into our AI data ecosystem for retail.”
