Migration to BW4/HANA for a Global Manufacturer of Building Materials

Customer Profile

The client is a Global Manufacturer of building materials that provides ceiling and wall solutions to help in the design and construction of commercial buildings and residential spaces.

Business Challenge

With the corporate edict to become a data-led intelligent enterprise, the client decided to upgrade its 20+ year old BW system as part of a broader digital transformation strategy. The increased M&A activity also drove the need for better data analytics as they had disparate sources of data, as well as stale data that hampered efficient analysis. Since this evolving competitive landscape required faster decision-making, they decided to transition from SAP BW system to SAP BW/4HANA 2.0 system as seamlessly as possible.

Partnering with Applexus

Since the client was Applexus’ existing SAP customer where we had successfully completed an analytics strategy project, they were confident in choosing us as the right partner for this project. The Applexus team used SAP’s shell conversion approach for successfully completing the migration of the 20+-year-old 3.5 TB classic BW system to a 350 GB SAP BW/4HANA 2.0 system. This approach gave the flexibility to select specific objects and data for conversion, accelerating the conversion process that lowered risk and shortened the project timeline.

Benefits Delivered

• Successful migration from BW 7.4 on Oracle DB to SAP BW/4HANA 2.0
• Reduction in database size from 3.5TB to 350 GB through selective data extraction and object migration and SAP HANA-enabled data compression
• Technical optimization through the virtualization of data objects
• Dramatic improvement in agility, performance and speed