Evonik - specialty chemicals for the easy life

[Former Member]

Evonik Industries AG

Finding innovative solutions that help to make lives more healthy, comfortable, and environmentally sustainable. Whether it is making car travel safer, or helping urban areas sustain growth better, or evolve personal care products for your daily use, Evonik Industries AG, one of the world's leading specialty chemicals companies, is focused on key megatrends in health, nutrition, resource efficiency, and globalization.

Total business visibility

To achieve above-average performance, Evonik harmonizes its business processes and consolidates its business applications.

• Chemical business with harmonized processes and key performance indicators on one common IT platform provides high transparency about business performance.
• Best practices implemented can be leveraged and continuously improved.
• Reporting, controlling and monthly closing processes are highly efficient and fast throughout the entire business segments.

End of lifecycle and new opportunities

Our top-notch SAP Business Warehouse platform was powered by a SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator. Due to fast growing demands the installed hardware capacity has been exhausted and an upgrade path was evaluated. The further development of the BWA technology has been discontinued by SAP and the required functionality is now offered within the SAP HANA technology.

The easy way into HANA

A HANA prove of concept (PoC) project has shown encouraging results: the migration could be executed without technical problems, PoC key-figures were very promising and the HANA appliance ran stable throughout the whole test program.

The announcement of the new Data Migration Option (DMO) enabling SAP BW upgrade, Unicode conversion and data base migration in one step had been striking together with the option to reduce run costs by archiving aged data in a Near Line Storage Solution (NLS). We decided for the new one step approach DMO to upgrade our SAP BW software, migrate it to the SAP HANA® platform, and switch to Unicode. DMO worked fine and reduced effort, cost and project time in a significant magnitude.

The operational challenge was to achieve high availability, disaster tolerance, immediate responsiveness to change, and ease of use. So we installed a scale out HANA appliance with build in High Availability using a spare blade, disaster tolerance using SAP HANA System Replication option and cluster features for the connected NLS system. The operating is supported thru SAP LVM.

Fast, lean processing

We need to keep SAP HANA fast and lean by offloading chores that don’t call for in-memory computing speed. We know our business users usually request data from the current and previous business years. So, we migrate all “historical” dynamic data to near-line storage (NLS) accessed via SAP IQ database software. NLS response times may be four times slower than those of SAP HANA, but they are still much faster than our legacy archives.

Major gains in speed and efficiency

Data load, query response, and calculation times across Big Data volumes were cut significantly thanks to SAP HANA. Data volume is compressed by a factor of 4. Data loading is 6 times faster. Integrated planning applications (BI-IP) are accelerated by a factor of 3 to 5.

As a result of the in-memory computing, our reporting, controlling, and monthly closing processes are faster but are also highly efficient. Our “Business Analytics Excellence” program fully relies on the system consolidation, minimized latency of data, and simplified usage achieved through SAP HANA. With a single source of truth to guide us, we are managing the business fundamentally better. Harmonized business processes and KPIs support our business units reaching the company’s goals. We were able to deliver the fast and high available reporting platform our business requires.

Three worldwide firsts

We consolidatedour multiple SAP ERP applications and implemented a central state-of-the-art reporting platform with SAP BW powered by SAP HANA. This project showcases trailblazer innovation via three worldwide firsts in conjunction with SAP HANA:

• We leveraged the mission-critical system replication functionality of SAP HANA for disaster tolerance. A setup using two data centers with a seven-minute failover provides us with the high-availability and disaster tolerance our customers need.
• We upgraded and migrated SAP BW to SAP HANA and switched to Unicode in a single step using the Software Update Manager tool and the data migration option (DMO).
• We keep historical data available and accessible in cost-efficient near-line storage using SAP IQ database software.

The customer counts

Using SAP HANA means we respond faster and more adroitly to our customers’ changing needs. SAP HANA let us cut unnecessary complexity and virtually eliminate latency. This means faster response times for our users. Innovation can be identified and transferred to our customer while best practices are implemented and can be shared, putting knowledge and experience at the fingertips of business units and user across the Evonik concern.

“The SAP BW application powered by SAP HANA, including a near-line storage archive, is realized in high-availability and disaster tolerance set-up. It helps us provide high-performance access to BI data across all time zones and has set the stage for further enhancements in reporting and business process performance using SAP HANA.”

Dr. Harald Claus, Information Officer, Corporate IT, Evonik Industries AG

But what will the world’s rapidly expanding body of consumers need 10 years from now? To answer that question, today’s business must be equipped with the tools and skills to detect enormous market shifts as they happen. And they are happening, with greater force than ever before. That business must then have the vision and insight to know how to meet that tsunami of demand with the products that satisfy. Evonik is there now with SAP HANA.