Vaillant Group optimises
economic eectiveness
Case Study
Industry
Machine and plant construction
Objective
Create an IT infrastructure for the realtime monitoring of costs and revenues
at product and customer level
Approach
Implement and operate the IT
infrastructure for in-memory computing
based on SAP HANA
IT matters
• Streamlined, cost-eicient IT solution
with simplified data infrastructure
• Performance increased by a factor
of 10
• Data reduced by a factor of eight
• Data growth curbed compared with
conventional relational databases
• Lower outlay for operations and
support
Business matters
• Improved business management
thanks to cogent reports and analyses
in real-time
• Overview of Group-wide costs and
sales by product and customer
• Better receivables management due
to ongoing analysis of cash flows per
customer
• Support for month- and year-end
closing
• Well-founded conditions for quick and
targeted decision-making
HPE Services delivers hosting, application
development and service desk support
“When it comes to SAP
HANA expertise, no one
comes close to HPE. We are
very pleased with the
results. SAP HANA runs
perfectly – and the
Real-time costs and
revenues at a glance
With support from HPE, the Vaillant
Group has implemented real-time data
capture and analysis on the basis of
SAP HANA.
support works.”
– Mamun Natour, Head of SAP Business
Intelligence, Vaillant Group
Case study
Vaillant Group
Industry
Machine and plant
construction
Challenge
Long run times in reporting
The Vaillant Group is an international
company headquartered in Remscheid,
Germany that operates in the fields of
heating, ventilation and air conditioning
technology. As one of the world’s market
and technological leaders, the Vaillant
Group develops and produces tailormade products, systems and services for
comfortable living. Its product portfolio
ranges from eicient heaters based on
conventional energy sources through to
system solutions for using regenerative
energies. With the introduction of SAP
HANA, the Vaillant Group has access to
Group-wide Business Intelligence at a whole
new level. In-memory computing requires
a high-performance and extremely agile IT
infrastructure. HPE is the lead partner in
setting up and running this infrastructure.
More than a decade ago, the IT landscape
of all companies in the Vaillant Group was
consistently standardised. The aim was to
sustainably fulfil the growing IT demands
of a global corporation. A central pool was
created for the Group’s approximately
150,000 material master records and over
one million customer master records. For
this purpose, SAP NetWeaver Business
Intelligence (BI) was introduced as a
central data warehouse. But long run times
in reporting, for example reports about
outstanding receivables, were unacceptable
for a company that wished to maintain its
innovative capacity and competitive edge.
SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA)
has already allowed the Vaillant Group
to gain initial experience of in-memory
computing. Straight away, the Vaillant
Group was able to use BWA to speed up
sales analyses by a factor of 10. When the
hardware leasing contracts expired for the
BWA systems, the time had come for a
further innovative boost. Expectations were
high: the Group and its companies required
a much quicker planning system. At the
same time, hardware, operating and support
costs were to be reduced significantly.
Solution
Reliable real-time forecasts thanks to
SAP HANA
When SAP HANA is used as the appliance
software, the database runs in the main
memory, rather than on a disc in the storage
system. Real-time data processing gives a
huge boost to performance. With in-memory
computing, the Vaillant Group aimed not
only to speed up planning processes, but
also to clearly assign costs and sales to
individual products.
This was to allow the divisions and central
units within the Group to clearly determine
the contribution made to the overall result
at any time. But there was much more to it
than that, the Vaillant Group wanted to use
reliable real-time forecasts to remain one
step ahead of the market at all times.
For the company, the transition of SAP
HANA to the ramp-up phase was the ideal
opportunity to move over to this forwardlooking technology.
Case study
Vaillant Group
Industry
Machine and plant
construction
As an outsourcing partner, HPE’s role was
to get the Vaillant Group’s IT infrastructure
ready for SAP HANA. This included
upgrading from SAP Business Intelligence
7.01 to 7.30. The Business Intelligence
Fast Start services jointly developed by
HPE and SAP were used here, the overall
software package to be newly installed was
preconfigured “ex works” and certified by
SAP. The BI upgrade and installation of SAP
HANA were followed by migration from the
previous relational database to the new
in-memory solution. The data migration was
completed by HPE quickly and reliably by
backing up the old system and recovering
it to the empty SAP HANA installation. The
entire migration took just 12 hours.
“With SAP HANA, the database system can
be easily rebuilt by means of recovery. Our
earlier relational database did not provide
this option,” says Natour, Head of SAP
Business Intelligence, Vaillant Group.
Experts from HPE herald a new
hardware era
The experts from HPE also welcomed
the start of a new era for hardware. The
previous, UNIX®-based server systems were
replaced with state-of-the-art, cost-eicient
servers with x86 architecture, which is wellestablished on the market. The number of
servers for the data warehouse was reduced
from twelve to just three. And an opensource Linux operating system performs
its tasks with the required stability and
performance.
“When it comes to the infrastructure for
SAP HANA, HPE knows what matters. Our
experiences of working with HPE and SAP
have been very good,” emphasises Natour.
The proof-of-concept for SAP BW on HANA
was conducted together with experts from
SAP. Several scenarios, including days in
receivables for all companies in the Vaillant
Group, were used as specific case studies.
This showed a substantial consolidation
of the database volume. Further database
reductions were achieved through clearups and moving from row to column-based
data storage. “This was a great opportunity
to reduce the dataset through consistent
housekeeping. Anything more than three
years old went overboard,” explains Natour.
Benefits
Going live and hitting targets
The SAP HANA go-live process, including
the high-performance planning functions
of SAP BI Integrated Planning (BIIP), took
place with the utmost precision. The time
frame and budget were maintained. SAP
HANA is a system of very low complexity.
The database has shrunk from around 4.2
TB to just 350 GB. Natour proudly reports
on the results of the project: “The data
loading process is faster by a factor of up
to 170. Thanks to SAP HANA, the total run
time for data loading has dropped from 18
to seven hours. We have seen the change
run accelerate from almost half an hour to
just two minutes. And we are seeing data
extraction improve by around half.”
Case study
Vaillant Group
Industry
Machine and plant
construction
Customer solution
at a glance
Application
In-memory computing for real-time
reporting and analyses
Hardware
• HPE ProLiant DL980 Server
Software
• SAP HANA
• SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
HPE services
• Transformation Services for SAP
HANA
• Fast Start Services
Natour also confirms the positive status
of data growth. In the first year since SAP
HANA went live, the Vaillant Group saw data
growth of just 15 per cent. The relational
database previously used led to annual
data growth of around 43 per cent. “SAP
HANA boosts the performance of Business
Warehouse, simplifies the IT infrastructure
and reduces operating costs,” emphasises
Natour.
“ The data loading process
is faster by a factor of up
to 170. Thanks to SAP
HANA, the total run time for
data loading has dropped
from 18 to seven hours. We
have seen the change run
accelerate from almost half
an hour to just two minutes.
And we are seeing data
extraction improve by
around half.”
Quicker provision and display of critical
business data through SAP HANA allows the
Vaillant Group and its divisions to track costs
and revenues by product and customer
promptly and precisely. SAP HANA can also
be used to manage accounting processes
much more quickly and precisely, and
financial closings can be created faster.
Viewing customer behaviour in real time
enables plans to be precisely attuned to
changes on the market. Well-founded
real-time forecasts play a crucial role in the
success of the Group’s business plans.
Learn more at
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– Mamun Natour, Head of SAP Business
Intelligence, Vaillant Group
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4AA5-1442EEW, February 2016, Rev. 1
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