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Even though SAP HANA is primarily marketed as a big data buster, there’s actually much more to this in-memory juggernaut than meets the eye. I quickly found this out after a chance meeting with SAP customer Tamko, a manufacturer of building products, at SAP TechEd 2012 in Las Vegas.

Tamko is a privately held company with all business operations planted firmly in the continental U.S. While they don’t have big data problems commonly associated with a global supply chain, it still has plenty to worry about when it comes to getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

Tamko implemented SAP ECC in 2007. Over time, access to data became more complex and time consuming.  In 2011 the company turned to SAP HANA (by way of Rapid Deployment Solution) to provide the business with access to their own data and allow them to develop their own reports rather than rely on others.

“SAP HANA is a brand new appliance that takes advantage of our SAP systems side by side,” said Chuck Martin, Director of Application Development at Tamko. According to Martin, SAP HANA is more about building a “long-term foundation” for data reporting. Pranav Bhatt, Senior Programmer at Tamko, said a few “quick win” surprises popped up along the way, thanks to their decision to use a Rapid Deployment Solution. “There was no need to rebuild a new system from the ground up.  Just do some basic testing and it’s good to go. The Rapid Deployment Solution requires much less IT resources – you don’t need a big-bang IT team to make it work.”

Because of this, Tamko now asks “why not SAP HANA?” for most of its IT projects like the following:

  • Maintenance Reliability Dashboard Project
  • Mobility Reporting initiatives
  • BusinessObjects Experience – Explorer
  • Mobile BI – WebI
  • Manufacturing Operations Dashboard
  • Sales History on WebChannel (prototype)
  • New/Changes to existing reports
  • Customer facing portal

As you can see, Tamko isn’t using SAP HANA to crunch billions of records in milliseconds.  By tapping its power for everyday reporting needs, and a host of other projects designed to make the company run better, “new opportunities present themselves frequently”, said Martin.

Follow me on Twitter @TClark01

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