PUMA SE
Customer & challenge
PUMA is one of the world‘s leading sports brands for designing, developing, selling and marketing footwear, apparel and accessories. The performance and athletic lifestyle products include categories such as Soccer/Football, Running, Training and Fitness, Golf and Motor Sports. Established in Herzogenaurach, Germany in 1948, the company employs more than 10,000 employees worldwide. With the brands PUMA, Cobra Golf, Dobotex and Brandon, the PUMA Group distributes its products in more than 120 countries worldwide and generated revenues of 2.97 billion euros in 2014.
Within the framework of standardizing business processes and systems as part of the corporate strategy of the sports and lifestyle giant, the SAP for Retail industry solution based on SAP ERP 6.0 was introduced in all national organizations. The solution is used for processes and order processing, as well as for other purposes. For management reporting in ordering processing, PUMA uses the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report generating system and SQL Server Analysis Services for multidimensional data management. The company analyses, for example, which items are needed in each national organization, which manufacturers in the respective areas are entrusted with production, whether they comply with quality standards such as delivery reliability, etc. The challenge was to integrate data from SAP for Retail quickly, reliably and in an automated way into Microsoft SQL Server.
„Short response times gives us a significant competitive advantage. Xtract IS makes an important contribution to this, because we can integrate decision-relevant data from SAP into our SQL server-based analysis systems quickly and automatically.“
Rainer Erras, Senior Developer IT Business Intelligence Solutions, PUMA SE
Solution with Xtract IS
Through in-depth vendor research, PUMA came across Theobald Software from Stuttgart, Germany, and invited the SAP interface experts to
Herzogenaurach to take a closer look at the Xtract IS component suite. This allows SAP data extraction processes to be directly integrated into SQL
Server, using SQL Server Integration Services. Nine different connector elements are available for modeling a data flow between SAP and SQL Server.
PUMA opted for the component Table (for directly transferring mass data from SAP tables) and DeltaQ. With DeltaQ, the API Extractor of the SAP ERP system can be controlled, and its functionality can be used in the same way that an SAP BW system sources data from the production SAP ERP system. The interface features that won over the customer were the high degree of maturity, easy operation and the attractive price-performance ratio. Theobald Software also scored points in terms of service: “In order to be able to use the component, some adjustments had to be made in the SAP system. Theobald Software gave us competent support on this,” adds Rainer Erras, Senior Developer IT Business Intelligence Solutions, PUMA SE. “Even additional questions that arose during development and at the beginning of productive use were answered quickly by the support team.”
In the first stage, the SAP ERP systems from three different regions were included. To ensure that the data transfer worked, the business divisions had access to the SAP systems and were able to see orders chosen at random. It was then checked to see if the corresponding data also arrived in the reporting system. “No information was lost in any way. The extractors are also very stable and we have yet to experience a failure. Since Xtract IS is
self-explanatory, we did not require any additional external support or training after the introductory period – an important aspect in terms of cost,” says the Senior Developer IT Business Intelligence Solutions.
Challenge
Reliable, automated transfer of retail data from 120 countries, from SAP for Retail to MS SQL Server.
Advantages
• Company has no SAP development costs
• Fast implementation
• Low cost for implementation and follow-up
• Direct integration of the SAP extraction processes into SQL Server Integration Services
• Simple design of a single, integrated database for analyses and reports
