Nestlé Germany AG
Customer & challenge
With over 20 locations and a revenue of €3.5 billion, Nestlé Germany AG is the largest food company in Germany. Based in Frankfurt, Nestlé AG has 333,000 employees across 150 countries worldwide. Their products include everything from water and baby food to confectionery and culinary products.
Staying technologically relevant
To maintain their competitive edge in the digital age, Nestlé AG relies on digital technologies such as big data analytics. They use this tech to analyze decision-relevant information from different SAP BW (central data warehouse) and local, non-SAP systems. They utilized SAP Business Objects (BO) with the add-in SAP Analysis for Office (AfO) as an intelligence tool.
As part of a landscape shift, Nestlé AG decided to discontinue their use of SAP BO. By the time they reached out to us, they decided on the Microsoft platform as a centralized environment. This required a way for the automated extraction of data from SAP BW into MS Azure.
“Xtract Universal allows us to automatically and quickly extract large amounts of data from SAP and store it flexibly in various Microsoft target environments.”
Raymond Hacker, Head of NiM Systems & Processes (Digital Reporting, Application & Automation, LCCC), Corporate Controlling, Nestlé Germany AG
Solution with Xtract Universal
Nestlé has chosen a combination of Xtract Universal for data extraction and KNIME for data processing. Because Xtract Universal enabled SAP integration into Azure, KNIME was able to access the data from there. Raymond Hacker, Corporate Controlling, Nestlé Deutschland AG, noted: “Xtract Universal has proven itself because it can extract data from SAP with high efficiency, and it can work flexibly with both SAP sources and any given target environment.”
The team led by Raymond Hacker started with a free trial version of Xtract Universal. “As a pilot project, we extracted several gigabytes of financial data using SAP BW queries. The results were very promising, and we were also impressed with the competent and personal support of Theobald Software. So, we decided to put the interface into productive operation.”
Customer: Nestlé Germany AG
Challenge: Replacement of SAP Analysis for Office with an ETL solution for transferring SAP data to various Microsoft target environments
Solution: Xtract Universal
Installation time: Implementation took just a few weeks
Added value: 30 percent less effort for data extraction
Reduced data transfer time by 30%
Raymond Hacker continued: “By using Xtract Universal, not only were we able to achieve our specific goal of transferring SAP data to MS Azure, but we also took meaningful steps toward increased automation. We can now extract SAP data automatically, making the process more efficient. We would guess the process is around 30 percent faster now than before we made the switch.”
As a next step, Nestlé wants to extract SAP tables from ECC using Xtract Universal. In addition, the company plans to scale the solution to other areas in-house: For example, it needs to make SAP BW data usable for a Power BI-based dashboard for top management, which includes different reports on finance as well as sales, operations and marketing.
