Maximizing SAP Data Services

It really takes convincing and in-depth stakeholder understanding to get buy in for new IT projects. It is equally difficult to get time from business users for any IT implementation, let alone a simple SAP upgrade, that seemingly has little return from a business perspective. This explains the reason many corporations are not upgrading their SAP system or even leveraging the existing SAP BI tools they’ve already acquired!

I was recently in a client demo with Don Loden and Roy Wells, listening to the client ask some questions about SAP Data Services and other EIM tools. We noticed the client had purchased Data Services with the BusinessObjects toolset, but they were not using the software and were having terrible performance issues with their old ETL tool. I believe there are a lot of SAP customers who are in the same situation, and who are at a crossroad about whether to invest more in a new tool or stick with the old, problematic one. Luckily, most organizations that use BusinessObjects for reporting either already have Data Services, or can easily add it to their existing license to resolve most of their current ETL issues.

For example, another client recently implemented BW on HANA. They invested a great amount of time and resources into creating well-designed DSOs, Cubes, multiproviders, as well as incorporating data from NON-SAP sources. Since they already had Data Services, there was no need for new development and modeling efforts. We were able to stage and transform the external data, SAP BW DSOs and Cubes into SAP HANA, allowing us to directly create views for their reports. Most of our look-ups were done in Data Services, and we were able to leverage ECC tables and extractors, providing increased performance.

SAP Data Services is still the best-of-breed ETL tool that delivers a single-enterprise solution for data integration, data quality, data profiling, and text data processing. It allows you to integrate, transform, improve, and deliver trusted data to critical business processes. There is so much that you can accomplish with it.

Whether you have BW, BPC, HANA or just use BusinessObjects for reporting, often your data extraction can take hours and reports can be delayed. With Data Services, you can get significant data load improvement and improve the quality of your data and reports, all delivered in a timely manner.

About Eric Vanderpuije
Eric Vanderpuije is a Business Intelligence Consultant with an extensive background in BW, data analysis, and ETL development.  Eric has over 10+ years of experience of which 6 + focusing in BI Architecture, Data Modeling, BW tools set including developing Infocubes, DSOs, Multi provider, DTP, Transformation, Data sources, BW Reporting BEx Analyzer, InfoSet Query, and Web Reporting (WAD), BI Integration, and Datasource enhancement.

Eric came to Decision First Technologies after being with Wipro Technologies, where he was a BW lead. He also has experience in data warehousing with SAP DataServices, focusing on data integration and warehousing with SAP DataServices and a variety of database systems, including HANA and Netezza.