SV Group
Customer & challenge
The SV Group is a catering and hotel management company based in Dübendorf, Switzerland. The company is one of Switzerland, Germany and Austria’s top catering providers. They employ around 6,900 people and work with over 500 staff restaurants and cafeterias across Europe. You can learn more on their website: www.sv-group.com.
SV Group uses SAP S/4HANA to manage approximately 500 operations, the core applications being the FI (Finance) and HR (Human Resources) modules. Microsoft Power BI is used company-wide for data evaluation and analytical applications. Here, the data is sourced from a central data warehouse (DWH) on SQL Server. To populate the DWH, Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is used as the ETL tool. However, SSIS could not connect to their SAP environment as a data source, meaning key information was not being populated into the DWH. In the past, SV Group had developed their own data flows to assist with data transfers. But knowing how much work would go into developing another in-house solution, they wanted a ready-to-use SAP connector that would be both adaptable and easy to scale.
“Xtract IS is our universal adapter for reliably and quickly integrating SAP data into our Microsoft environments.”
Andrej Scholz, Head IT Data & Analytics at SV Group
Solution with Xtract IS
The answer was obvious, according to Head of IT Data & Analysis, Andrej Scholz:
“We have been using the Theobald Software interface Xtract Universal for some time to integrate SAP data into our planning solution. We are very satisfied with the solution, so we also wanted to use an interface from Theobald Software for the transfer of SAP data to the Microsoft environment.”
Within a few hours, Andrej Scholz’s Data & Analytics team installed a free test version of the Xtract IS component suite, which enables seamless integration between the SAP system (ERP, S/4HANA, BW, BW/4HANA) and the SQL Server Integration Services.
Challenge: SAP data integration into an MS SQL Server-based DWH as a central data hub for analytics and reporting applications for the entire group of companies.
Solution: Xtract IS
Time to deploy: A few hours
Added value: Integration of SAP data into a Microsoft-based data hub for BI applications; time and cost savings due to the elimination of in-house development costs; future security due to the scalability and flexibility of the interface
“The technical proof-of-concept was very quick and uncomplicated. Installation and configuration on the DWH side were completely unproblematic,” Andrej reported. “Within 14 days it became clear that Xtract IS could easily ensure the stable, automated, and high-performance data integration from SAP into our DWH that we needed.”
In the end, Andrej Scholz is very satisfied with how quick and easy it was for him to integrate SAP data with Xtract IS. “We also benefit from fast access to SAP data,” he told us. “Both in terms of the metadata-based search for the required data and in terms of loading speed. We are far from exhausting the capacity limits. Thanks to the good loading performance, we can also transfer large amounts of data from SAP to our DWH in order to make it available there for BI and analytical applications.”
