Vestas is the energy industry's global partner on sustainable energy solutions. The company is a world leader in manufacturing wind turbines with an installed capacity of more than 117 GW globally. To manage and control its supply chain, Vestas relies on data and analytics to run its processes smoothly, secure capacity, and manage risks.
When exploring potential solutions, Vestas was looking for compatibility. They needed to centralize and standardize their data sources, including SAP BW, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SQL, to give employees easy access to trusted data. Where possible, they wanted to avoid unnecessary data replication by using live connectivity. To reduce the time from ideation to analysis, Vestas needed self-service data access and modelling for business users in a safe and controlled environment.
With the new setup that includes SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, lead times on data are often days rather than months. With fast data access, business analyses are now much quicker while saving scarce IT resources.
With SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, we now have a tool that lets us connect the right person to the right data with a few clicks of a button. Our front-end developers and business analysts will have access to the data they need in a modeling environment that does not require deep technical knowledge. Ultimately, we want to make the experience simple for business users and enable them to access content via SAP Analytics Cloud regardless of the underlying data sources. This kind of standardization is essential in large organizations like Vestas.
Caio Castro, BI Specialist at Vestas
Vestas’ data landscape includes a mix of SAP and non-SAP systems. The setup consists of SAP Business Warehouse, SAP ERP, and third-party systems from Oracle as well as Microsoft SQL Server. Additionally, business users store their data in Excel and CSV files.
SAP BW stores most of the data needed for analytics, but the data volume is often so high that front-end tools will reach their limit when trying to apply additional calculations. To ensure data validity and to handle large data volume, business users had to create an IT ticket to request a change in SAP BW. Scarce IT resources meant that this process created long waiting times for data, and at the same time it prevented IT from focusing on more strategic tasks.
Vestas decided to go for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud to address these challenges.
At Vestas, IT sets up data flows and operational systems, and the processing and analysis of the data falls on specific lines of business. Optimizing production plans, inventory levels and financials are the responsibility of departments like Global Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Finance. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud together with SAP BW supports the lines of business by making better specifications through mock-ups on productive data – thereby improving the first-time-right ratio. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud can also cover short-term reporting needs, as well as business analytics on large data sets.
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud integrates into Vestas’ existing data landscape, easily virtualizing or replicating data from SAP BW, SQL or other sources in the cloud. Data modelling can be performed either by drag-and-drop or using SQL statements. Business users are also free to connect flat files to enterprise data to explore deeper insights. Data models created in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud are consumed in SAP Analytics Cloud for analysis and reporting. Vestas’ business users no longer have to import data into SAP Analytics Cloud and live data connection ensures the data validity.
Together, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud provide trusted data insights. Previously, importing data into our analytics tool was not only a time-consuming and manual effort, but it was also error prone. Now, with a direct live connection we have the confidence to start analyzing data knowing that the information we work with can be trusted in 100% as the data is recognizable
Caio Castro, BI Specialist at Vestas
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud’s Spaces are isolated work environments that allow business users to explore data without disrupting the source system. At Vestas, individual departments all have a designated Space. With Space Management, IT controls each Space’s data connections, user access, and computing/storage quotas. This way, each department can have data connections relevant to their business, whether they are SQL sources, on-premise, or in the cloud. Employees in that department only see the data they need.
Individual Spaces are isolated, but the data remains centrally governed and connected in real-time to Vestas’ enterprise systems. Business users can access their Space, upload local files, as well as model data. Data is then fed directly into their SAP Analytics Cloud dashboards and easily shared with stakeholders.
There seems to be this never-ending battle between business and IT within most organizations, and I believe that SAP really understood how to solve it through a collaborative platform like SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. The roadmaps and visions for SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud show that SAP wants to close many of the gaps in the analytics world. This is very much needed as we need to quickly turn data into actionable insights to stay competitive in our industry. Speed matters.
Caio Castro, BI Specialist at Vestas
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