CS Energy, Australia
Customer & challenge
CS Energy is a Queensland-owned and based energy company that provides reliable and competitively priced electricity. CS Energy generates and sells electricity in the Australian electricity market. The company is an energy retailer to commercial and industrial businesses, and they are investing in new energy assets, including solar and wind farms, renewable hydrogen and storage.
CS Energy had embarked on a multi-year project to modernize their BI platform. A key objective was to phase out SAP BW and transition to a Snowflake cloud data platform. Initially, the company used their existing ETL toolset with a built-in SAP Java connector to replicate data from SAP ECC and SAP BW to Snowflake. However, this process was slow, limited in functionality and was not scalable. For example, to replicate SAP table JEST
with production order status information to Snowflake, the existing ETL process took over 6 hours for just 50 million records. Other data assets in SAP ECC or SAP BW were not accessible with the built-in SAP connector and there was no support for incremental data loads.
“Xtract Universal was worth the investment.
We could not have delivered all elements in the
current project without it.”
Business Intelligence and Analytics Manager, CS Energy
Solution with Xtract Universal
With Xtract Universal, the client saw an immediate improvement in performance. The full replication of SAP table JEST now takes less than one hour to complete, which translates into 6 x better performance over the previous process. In addition to table data, the client can replicate data from other SAP data sources, including ABAP reports and BW source objects. CS Energy is using the DeltaQ component of Xtract Universal to achieve incremental loads. Data extracts can be run in parallel, further reducing the overall time it takes to replicate SAP data into the cloud data warehouse. The ability to send data in SAP to Snowflake was an important criterion for the client. The client expects that Xtract Universal will definitely be used
long-term, as SAP will remain the core system for finance, purchasing, payroll, overhauls work and plant permits. Compatibility with S/4HANA
and the SAP integration certification for S/4HANA were critical for Xtract Universal to be part of the BI roadmap of the client.
System environment
» SAP ECC 6
» SAP BW
» Snowflake
» Power BI
» Tableau Online
Advantages
» Good performance and reliability for larger
data loads
» Support for incremental data loads
» Access to ABAP reports, BW objects
» Direct integration with Snowflake
» Certified for SAP ECC and S/4HANA
