ESPRIT Europe GmbH
Customer & challenge
ESPRIT is an internationally renowned fashion brand headquartered in Germany and Hong Kong. Founded in 1968, the company has made a name for itself by producing high-quality clothing, shoes, and accessories. With a strong digital and in-person presence in more than 40 countries, ESPRIT serves a broad global audience. Known to be a leader in “Eco Fashion,” the company also boasts their commitment to sustainability by offering environmentally friendly collections – something they have done for nearly 40 years.
Before connecting with Theobald Software, the fashion retailer utilized the SAP Business Intelligence Suite to meet its data requirements. As part of a realignment of its business intelligence landscape towards Microsoft, ESPRIT was looking for a solution that would enable them to transfer data from SAP systems to their new Microsoft environment.
“Our approach is to make data from SAP and non-SAP systems centrally available to users, independently of a front end,” says Bisplinghoff, “We faced the challenge of automatically transferring data from modules like SAP for Retail and SAP F/CO to a Microsoft SQL Server and making it available there as certified data sets or semantic models for further processing with solutions like Power BI, allowing key users to work with SAP data in a self-service manner.”
“Xtract IS is an absolute must-have for us. Our business intelligence environment, based on the connection between SAP and Microsoft, wouldn’t work without it.”
Patrick Bisplinghoff, Director of IT Data Engineering at ESPRIT Europe GmbH.
Solution with Xtract IS
The team needed more than just the retrieval of SAP tables or views, explains Bisplinghoff: “It was important to us to transfer predefined extractors provided by SAP. Additionally, we use generic, custom code-based extractors that we also wanted to transfer automatically. Our order book management, for example, assigns ‘demand’ to ‘supply.’ SAP does not offer a standard extractor for this, so we programmed an individual function module with the corresponding business logic. Few interface solutions available on the market can transfer such custom-coded extractors from SAP.”
“Of course, we could have embedded business processes in the SAP system,” adds Patrick Bisplinghoff, “but that would have involved significant development effort during the migration, as all function module-based extractors would have had to be reprogrammed.”
ESPRIT decided to invest in Xtract IS. First, they installed the free trial version of the SAP interface during their Microsoft migration. After about two months, it was clear that Xtract IS would enable them to accomplish their goals, so they decided to invest in the solution.
Using Xtract IS, ESPRIT can extract and transfer around 180 data sources from SAP to their Microsoft SQL Server. This includes normal tables, along with pseudo-delta tables, which only contain relevant changes since the last extraction. The data is routinely updated every night.
The challenge: Transferring data from SAP to a Microsoft environment in a unique, customized way
Solution: Xtract IS
Added Value: Enabling the centralized provision of SAP data in a Microsoft environment | Reliably transferring SAP extractors based on custom coding
“Of course, every software has its quirks that you need to understand first,” says Bisplinghoff. “In my view, this was relatively simple with Xtract IS. The initial installation took a bit longer, but now everything runs smoothly, and the operation is intuitive.”
High marks were also given to Theobald Software’s support team, which ESPRIT utilized during a version adjustment.
Thanks to Xtract IS, ESPRIT can now reliably extract data from various SAP systems and routinely integrate it into Microsoft SQL Server.
“It became very clear to us during the evaluation process that we get the best performance in terms of robustness and reliability with the interface from Theobald Software, especially when it comes to extractors based on custom coding,” says Bisplinghoff.
