SAP and Google Cloud Data Harmonization for Efficient Analytics & Reporting — Veolia

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Veolia North America, with its mission of ecological transformation, has helped customers address environmental and sustainability challenges in energy, water, and waste management for over 170 years. With a global workforce of over 220,000, Veolia caters to hospitality, transportation, data centers, retail, oil and gas, and other markets.

Veolia NA is a large SAP S/4HANA customer that uses Google Cloud Platform for its infrastructure & data strategy. Large amounts of its financial and other 3rd party data are housed in Google BigQuery schemas

Current Data Challenges

Scenario 1

• Veolia has heterogenous financial data (SAP and PeopleSoft data) siloed in disparate systems. Gathering and managing the combined data required to create financial reports or perform advanced analytics is often challenging.
• Currently, unified reports cannot use real-time data from siloed systems.

Scenario 2

• Veolia wants to replicate S/4HANA on-premise data to Google Cloud Platform. 3rd party solutions to this problem, which Veolia is currently evaluating, haven’t adequately addressed Veolia’s specific needs and challenges.
• Extended ETL time, the cost and additional steps needed to duplicate data, along with a loss of context and the need to rebuild semantics, all contribute to a longer time to market.
• Duplicating data across different sources for analytics also presents additional costs and challenges.

The Proposed Solution

SAP Datasphere—an SAP Business Technology Platform solution based on the business fabric architecture—is positioned as the enterprise data harmonization layer. SAP Datasphere’s premium outbound integration feature is used to replicate SAP accounting data into Google BigQuery schemas and Google Cloud Storage in near-real-time. SAP Datasphere helps make semantically rich data available for advanced analytics in Google BigQuery

Furthermore, SAP Datasphere’s data federation feature is used to virtualize the PeopleSoft data from Google BigQuery into semantic models. The PeopleSoft data can be combined with SAP S/4HANA data in real time via SAP Datasphere’s unified semantic models without the need to duplicate data anywhere.

The Validation Outcome

Data management architectures showcased jointly as part of the SAP and Google Cloud Partnership, were successfully validated via this proposed solution for Veolia which showed promise to tackle their data challenges for each of the two scenarios above.

1. A sizable amount of Veolia’s PeopleSoft finance data (by way of Google BigQuery) was referenced through virtual (remote) tables in SAP Datasphere. This data was then unified with accounting CDS views from SAP S/4HANA on-premise to create analytic models in SAP Datasphere. All the data used for the models was federated live from the respective sources, thus validating a real-time data approach towards powering an SAP Analytics Cloud story.
2. An SAP Datasphere replication flow was used to replicate accounting data to Google BigQuery. The source system used was SAP S/4HANA on-premise, which connected via Cloud Connector to SAP Datasphere. Several standard accounting CDS Views were selected for the transfer, with a mix of initial and delta enabled CDS views. Other custom CDS Views with aggregated data were also created and selected for the transfer with a Google BigQuery sink. The ease of replicating accounting based CDS views with automatic delta triggers without any manual intervention was demonstrated through the replication flow.

Credits

The project with Veolia to validate this SAP — Google partnership architecture was made possible by the valuable contributions of experts from SAP and Veolia. We would like to thank the following SAP members for their efforts: Sangeetha Krishnamoorthy, Karishma Kapur, Ran Bian, Alex Bishka; and Sivakumar N, Jason Yeung, Christian Thisgaard, Craig Halliday, and Em Kinsler for their valuable guidance and support.

And a special thanks to the following Veolia members for their continued collaboration: Vamsi Manne, Praveen Kumbham, Sreedevi Veerala, and Sourav Gupta.

For any questions, feel free to reach out to paa@sap.com.