Medis Group
Customer & challenge
Founded in 1989, Medis specializes in medical marketing in Central and Eastern Europe. It focuses on the marketing of specialized therapeutics, medical devices, and OTC brands, i.e., medicinal products that can be bought in pharmacies without a prescription. The group of companies is headquartered in Slovenia. With subsidiaries they operate in 18 countries in the Central and Eastern European region. The mission of the approximately 400 employees worldwide is to give all patients in the region access to the most advanced and effective medical treatments using its marketing know-how, scientific expertise, and product knowledge. Learn more at: www.medis.com
Medis believes that it is particularly important to reach customers digitally so that they can find relevant professional information at the right time. The evaluation of data for corporate management plays a major role here. One challenge was to provide data from SAP ERP, the leading system, for use in business intelligence applications in Tableau and IBM Planning Analytics.
“Thanks to Xtract Universal, we can access up-to-date SAP data across company divisions automatically, centrally, quickly and reliably for analytics and reporting with IBM Planning Analytics and Tableau.”
Matej Sedej, System Analyst at Medis Group
Solution with Xtract Universal
Medis relies on the Snowflake cloud database as its data warehouse solution. It wanted to transfer the data by using technology from Theobald Software, since Medis had already had good experience with Xtract IS as an interface for integrating SAP BW and SQL Server Integration Services in the past. The company decided on Xtract Universal because the interface offers a particularly high level of flexibility for SAP data integration with databases as well as analytics, BI and cloud solutions.
Challenge
Automated extraction of SAP data and central provision for BI applications, such as IBM Planning Analytics, in the Snowflake cloud storage service.
Added value
Efficient, reliable process for loading data from SAP ERP 618 to Snowflake; availability of a central database for analytics with the IBM Planning Analytics and Tableau.
Time to deploy
A few hours for the initial installation.
To be on the safe side, the medical marketing specialists first opted for the free trial version of Xtract Universal. The installation was quick and easy, without the need for intensive support from Theobald Software.
It used the Xtract Universal components DeltaQ, Report and Table for the extraction of DataSources (OLTP) as well as extractors from SAP ERP, ABAP reports and data from SAP tables and views. Medis Group particularly valued the incremental data extraction feature, which gives the system high performance and ensures important access to up-to-date data.
The SAP data (from SAP ERP 618) provided by Xtract Universal in Snowflake is used for analytics, budgeting, dashboarding and reporting by the management and in the operations and maintenance, controlling, finance, logistics, marketing, and sales departments.
The main benefit of using Xtract Universal for Medis lies in the increased efficiency of the ETL process: Matej Sedej, system analyst at Medis Group, noted: “Data transfer used to be a multi-step process. It is now much easier and faster to add new fields and tables, and the high degree of automation has significantly reduced the time needed to develop new SAP content in the BI landscape.”
