The vast majority of organizations have no shortage of data to work with in the modern data space. In fact, most data teams report feeling overwhelmed by cluttered dashboards that leave them inundated with near-limitless stores of data. The solution to this problem, of course, is to build data models and processes that identify the most timely and actionable data insights amidst the endless information that organizations have access to.
That’s where ERPs like SAP and dynamic data platforms like Snowflake come in. Snowflake’s centralized data cloud platform allows organizations to unify their data and leverage sophisticated analytics tools, all while accounting for scalability, industry compliance, and data security. Meanwhile, SAP offers a robust platform where organizational functions are centralized to enable more efficient business process execution across the enterprise.
With SAP selectively feeding enterprise data to Snowflake, which then models and analyzes that data for maximum insight, these two tools can have incredible synergy, with the potential to transform a cluttered and inefficient data stack into a reliable source of powerful data insight.
In this article, we’ll discuss what exactly makes these two tools work so well together and then take a look at how a leading audio equipment manufacturer optimized their data stack through Snowflake and SAP to unlock faster, more impactful data insights, driving greater organizational success.
What Makes Snowflake and SAP Such a Powerful Combination?
There’s not a more robust enterprise resource planning software ecosystem on the market today than SAP, just as there’s no data cloud platform more powerful than Snowflake. The most innovative organizations are already using SAP to structure their workflow and increase enterprise collaboration and efficiency. Meanwhile, the majority of organizations have already made the jump to a centralized data cloud platform like Snowflake in order to unify and empower their diverse data to do more. When these tools are paired together, organizational data can truly blossom.
In addition to providing robust data warehousing, Snowflake allows organizations to analyze data according to their unique needs with unparalleled speed, precision, and security. Capable of incorporating sophisticated tools like machine learning and predictive AI, Snowflake can take vast amounts of data and produce quick and actionable insights that can drive organizational decision-making.
Finding Data Synergy with a Global Audio Equipment Manufacturer
When a leading audio equipment manufacturer partnered with Hakkoda to engineer a better data stack, they were facing several challenges. They were undergoing the upgrade of their SAP from R/3 ECC to S/4HANA. As part of the upgrade, a strategic decision was made to implement analytics in Snowflake rather than SAP BW4HANA. This was a strategic decision to lower operating costs and increase analytical agility.
This journey to implement was hampered organizationally. Their poorly-integrated data tools were only capable of producing certain key data insights at weekly and monthly rates, which meant they were consistently working with outdated data. Additionally, they needed to integrate vast amounts of data from SAP’s financial along with sales and delivery modules into Snowflake and model that data into useful analytical formats, like financial, income, and profit and loss statements—a process that was proving time-consuming and inefficient.
Hakkoda assisted the organization in leveraging accelerators to shorten the Snowflake implementation timeline and optimize the allocation of implementation resources, thus speeding up the migration process. Using our deep SAP expertise, Hakkoda also modeled SAP S/4 GL data sets into Snowflake, including P&L, income statements, and financial statements. This transformed unstructured data into legible analytical formats that were immediately useful and legible to the organization’s data team. Additionally, Hakkoda also ensured that the organization implemented best practices to ensure maximum security through Snowflake, implementing RBAC (role-based access control) and MFA (multi-factor authentication) features.
The results were striking: the organization was able to generate data insights at a daily cadence, exponentially improving the actionability and accuracy of those insights over the monthly report cadence available to them in the past. Better, more recent data was fed to decision-makers in order to drive strategy, which allowed more proactive business planning, rather than the reactive approach that was necessitated by an inefficient data stack. This new setup also yielded more “low-hanging fruit” data science use cases for end businesses users, potentially paving the way to save countless hours of manpower and eliminating the incidence of manual error.
Tap into the Powerful Synergy of SAP and Snowflake with Hakkōda
As the example above attests, there’s no denying the dynamic potential of deploying SAP and Snowflake together. Yet these tools are only as useful as the data models and analytical functions that power them, and those things require expertise to build and implement. That’s where Hakkoda comes in, with our certified Snowflake experts whose deep knowledge SAP can help you begin getting the most out of these game-changing technologies.
If you’re ready to efficiently centralize your SAP data and tap into the unparalleled analytical insight and security that Snowflake can bring, let’s talk today about how Hakkoda can help you find data synergy with these transformative data tools.
