Aachener Grundvermögen Kapitalverwaltungsgesellschaft mbH
Customer & challenge
Aachener Grundvermögen (AG) is a property capital management company. They have been in business for over 50 years with a focus on first-class retail properties in top inner-city locations.
AG and its subsidiary, AC+X Strategic Investments GmbH, want future generations to experience inner cities as lively urban spaces. By investing in retail and other activity options, they help preserve the value of these places and their established real estate. To improve their own efficiency in achieving this vision, AG is investing in the adoption of digital innovations that provide a uniform knowledge base for all employees.
As part of these digitalization measures, AG sought to implement Snowflake as a cloud hosted DWH, with Microsoft Power BI as a business intelligence solution. Vanessa Kremer from the Innovation/Digitization/IT Department of AG explained, “We wanted to make data from different sources available in a central location. That way, it could be further transformed, analyzed, and ultimately used to drive data-informed decisions.”
To achieve this goal, extracting data from SAP ERP 6.0 into Snowflake would need to be done on a daily basis. Vanessa Kramer continued: “It was clear to us from the outset that this would only be possible if we could ensure automated data transfer from SAP to Snowflake using a dedicated interface.”
“With Xtract Universal as the interface and Snowflake as the central DWH, we can analyze SAP data internally with Power BI in just a few minutes. We used to need up to two days and an external service provider to do this.”
Vanessa Kremer, Data Analyst | Aachener Grundvermögen Co.
Solution with Xtract Universal
Because of Theobald Software’s reputation as an expert for SAP interfaces, AG choose Xtract Universal as the SAP data integration tool. Being a stand-alone solution, Xtract Universal was a convenient option because it did not require any additional hardware or development effort. This was important as AG wanted to rapidly prototype a solution.
Now in production, AG uses Xtract Universal as their SAP to Snowflake extraction tool. From there, the extracted raw data is made available for further processing with Power BI. Individual extracts can be pre-filtered or edited in advance.
Kremer added: “We use Airflow, an orchestration tool for automating and monitoring data pipelines using DAGs, together with the Xtract Universal’s Web API to launch the extracts created in Xtract Universal so that the corresponding SAP tables are exported to Snowflake.”
Challenge: Integrating SAP data into Snowflake’s data warehouse (DWH) on the cloud
Solution: Xtract Universal’s Snowflake Integration
Time to deploy: Three months from implementation to setup, testing, and production
Added value: SAP data that can be used across analytics applications; report availability in minutes
Kremer also noted that Theobald Software has offered outstanding support throughout the process. She told us, “The service and support worked very well and quickly. For example, we needed support because Snowflake cannot read SAP’s date format. Thanks to Theobald Software, we were able to set up a suitable automatic conversion of dates in Xtract Universal. When there were problems with the extracted data packets due to duplicates, the service once again responded quickly and provided an update on short notice that solved the problem.”
Reporting has also improved. In the past, the task of generating department reports from SAP was so challenging, it was outsourced to an external service provider. “By building the data integration landscape with Snowflake and Xtract Universal,” Kremer told us, “we can easily access SAP data and flexibly build, modify, and distribute reports. It used to take up to two days for a department to have all the required data presented clearly in an Excel file. Now, it is just a matter of a few clicks! We no longer have to query individual SAP transactions or sift through SAP tables. We can just sit down with the department and create the exact reports that they need.”
She concluded: “With the help of Xtract Universal, Snowflake, and Power BI, we were able to connect SAP with the non-SAP world. Now, we have an all-round view of what is happening in our entire real estate world. Thanks to this set-up, we are also very well positioned for ESG reporting.”
