Atmel
Customer & challenge
Building on two decades of experience and industry leadership, Atmel offers the broadest microcontroller (MCU) portfolio.
Atmel has the world’s most popular AVR and ARM architecture and their 8-bit and 32-bit microcontroller are known for superior design and architecture. Atmel is also a world-class supplier of touch sensing solutions. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, and has approximately 5,100 employees worldwide.
The SAP landscape at Atmel includes multiple SAP BW systems from the newest releases going back to BW 3.5. SAP is a critical data source for many of Atmel’s reporting needs and the company had been using SAP Business Explorer (BEx) queries for reporting and ad-hoc analysis. The IT group was faced with a decision to expand on an existing SAP BusinessObjects implementation. While considering cost and time, as well as the objective to provide faster performance for reporting and what-if-analysis, Tableau became the visualization and analysis tool of choice. When it came to connecting Tableau to SAP data, Atmel was in need of a better solution.
“With Xtract Universal we can bring large SAP data sets directly into Tableau forour reporting needs.“
Taru Gupta, Business Intelligence Manager at Atmel Corporation.
Solution with Xtract Universal
For analysis and reports specific to manufacturing, data from existing SAP BW BEx queries was loaded, and variables could be used at extraction
time to vary the output of the queries. Large data sets of up to 2 million rows were extracted in less than 4 minutes. Due to the very good price/performance ratio compared to other solutions, the decision was made in favor of Xtract Universal from Theobald Software. The
product offers a total of nine different extraction types that can be used not only with SAP BW but also with SAP ECC and other SAP NetWeaver based systems. The extraction types that are offered with Xtract Universal include BEx queries, InfoProviders, function modules, tables,
queries, ABAP reports, and OLTP data sources that enable delta extraction. To automate the extraction process, Atmel utilizes the Task Scheduler application which is part of the Windows OS. Extracts are scheduled to run once per day.
Once the data is extracted from SAP, it can be provided to the target system in different formats. For Tableau server or desktop, the most straight-forward approach is to provide the SAP data in form of a TDE (Tableau Data Extract) file which was utilized by Atmel. Other scenarios are
possible with Xtract Universal where SAP data is provided as an OData feed or where a data warehouse environment is continuously updated with SAP data. The data warehouse can be on Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata and other database products. Tableau can connect directly with the TDE
file, the OData feed or the data warehouse.
Challenges
• SAP data in different environments
(SAP BW, SAP ECC, SAP SNP, SAP
DP) and different structures
• No suitable tool to bring large SAP data
sets into Tableau in a reliable and per
formant manner
• No time or budget for costly upgrades
or larger IT investments
Advantages
• Direct access to SAP data in different
formats and environments
• Reliable and performant data extraction
process
• Fast implementation at lower cost
• Direct access to SAP data in different formats and environments
• Reliable and performant data extraction process
• Fast implementation at a lower cost
