For most enter­pris­es today — big or small — data is a crit­i­cal part of busi­ness strat­e­gy. It pro­vides infor­ma­tion nec­es­sary to make smarter busi­ness deci­sions, but it also pre­pares an orga­ni­za­tion to bet­ter serve its employ­ees and, in turn, bet­ter serve its cus­tomers. For VELUX, a Dan­ish man­u­fac­tur­er of win­dows and sky­lights, bridg­ing on-premise and cloud data sources to bet­ter under­stand its cus­tomers and empow­er its employ­ees is nec­es­sary to advance its busi­ness objectives. 

The com­pa­ny turned to SAP Data Ware­house Cloud, which is cur­rent­ly avail­able through a beta pro­gram for a select group of SAP cus­tomers, to eval­u­ate a pay-as-you-go ser­vice that com­bines data-man­age­ment capa­bil­i­ties with advanced analytics.

ASUG sat down with Andreas Mad­sen, senior data and ana­lyt­ics part­ner at VELUX, to under­stand how the com­pa­ny devel­oped a proof-of-con­cept solu­tion using SAP Data Ware­house Cloud to gain an end-to-end view of all the data for both IT users and the less-tech­ni­cal busi­ness users, essen­tial­ly pro­vid­ing self-ser­vice mod­el­ing and report­ing capabilities. 

Spot­light on Data to Dri­ve Outcomes 

Known for bring­ing day­light into people’s homes for more than 75 years, VELUX is ready to shine some light into its own space and bet­ter under­stand its data — par­tic­u­lar­ly data about its end users. His­tor­i­cal­ly, VELUX has not had much insight on those who use its prod­ucts. The com­pa­ny has had close com­mu­ni­ca­tion with dis­trib­u­tors, installers, and retail­ers but has not reached con­sumers in the same way.

SAP Data Ware­house Cloud offers a promis­ing path for­ward for aggre­gat­ing data and cre­at­ing new busi­ness mod­els and busi­ness process­es that tap any data source inside and out­side of VELUX. Using this data, the com­pa­ny is look­ing to enhance prod­uct qual­i­ty and allow busi­ness users access to self-ser­vice report­ing, ulti­mate­ly lead­ing to col­lab­o­ra­tion and intel­li­gent deci­sion-mak­ing across the organization.

In the past, VELUX relied on its data and ana­lyt­ics depart­ment to cre­ate queries based on requests from busi­ness users, which was not the most effi­cient process. The self-ser­vice mod­el­ing and report­ing avail­able through SAP Data Ware­house Cloud will allow busi­ness users to do a lot more on their own. ​“One of the key ben­e­fits of SAP Data Ware­house Cloud is its abil­i­ty to do live data mod­el­ing on top of live data col­lec­tion instead of hav­ing to move the data around all the time,” Mad­sen said.

Build­ing out the Frame­work for Data 

VELUX’s data ecosys­tem is com­plex. It brings in data both from on-premise sources and the cloud. Accord­ing to Mad­sen, near­ly 95% of its data, which is stored in SAP BW/4HANA, an on-premise, cloud-ready data ware­hous­ing solu­tion, comes from the company’s own cor­po­rate enter­prise sys­tem. ​“But we also rely on out­side data sources to fill in the miss­ing pieces,” Mad­sen said. 

VELUX is look­ing for a way to man­age and assim­i­late data from 50 – 60 dif­fer­ent data­bas­es. Addi­tion­al­ly, the data needs to be vis­i­ble, action­able, and inte­grat­ed for bet­ter deci­sion-mak­ing. SAP Data Ware­house Cloud com­bined with SAP BW/4HANA offers that solu­tion with­out requir­ing busi­ness­es to move all of their data. It sup­ports a hybrid archi­tec­ture that allows the busi­ness users to build mod­els with­out hav­ing to migrate or repli­cate the under­ly­ing data. 

Ulti­mate­ly, the tech lead­ers at VELUX expect the vir­tu­al­iza­tion capa­bil­i­ties of the SAP Data Ware­house Cloud solu­tion to allow the com­pa­ny to get clos­er to their cus­tomers and con­sumers so it can more effec­tive­ly expand. 

Play­ing with Data in the Light 

Based on the SAP Data Ware­house Cloud proof of con­cept, VELUX antic­i­pates a smooth tran­si­tion as it onboards its busi­ness users and pre­pares them to use these new self-ser­vice func­tion­al­i­ties. This is why it was so impor­tant for VELUX to have buy-in from the busi­ness users from the very begin­ning. ​“The busi­ness users are very much a part of our deci­sion-mak­ing process,” Mad­sen explained. ​“We have three to four dif­fer­ent busi­ness units par­tic­i­pat­ing in the proof of con­cept and through­out the deci­sion-mak­ing process, and this is help­ing with change man­age­ment, too.” 

Once the planned frame­work is set up, all the busi­ness users will be able to exper­i­ment with mod­el­ing and report­ing in cus­tom-cre­at­ed Spaces, using only data that is rel­e­vant for them. They are also expect­ed to have access to advanced report­ing capa­bil­i­ties that will not require any­one from the data and ana­lyt­ics depart­ment to step in and assist, sav­ing time and effort all around. VELUX is antic­i­pat­ing being able to cre­ate a scal­able mod­el that can be reused. The abil­i­ty to cre­ate a hybrid data land­scape that is eas­i­ly acces­si­ble to all busi­ness users will make a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in how VELUX uses its data to dis­cov­er insights for bet­ter busi­ness decisions. 

VELUX is now plan­ning to grad­u­al­ly expand its cur­rent ana­lyt­ics from on-premise to include the cloud. Because cus­tomer data lives in on-premise, struc­tured data ware­hous­es, the com­pa­ny is look­ing to con­nect to more data sources in the cloud and become even more data-dri­ven. VELUX will keep its core SAP ECC sys­tem and SAP BW/4HANA data ware­house as a pri­ma­ry data source, but the orga­ni­za­tion will explore inno­vat­ing with SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Data Ware­house Cloud, and SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud. ​“We need to think dif­fer­ent­ly going for­ward,” Mad­sen said. ​“This [SAP Data Ware­house Cloud] is a cloud-native solu­tion — it’s dif­fer­ent. It offers new, inno­v­a­tive options for pow­er­ful ana­lyt­ics that could real­ly aug­ment our business.” 

Learn how PwC ​“Makes Its Data Work Hard­er with SAP Data Ware­house Cloud.” You can also reg­is­ter for the ASUG web­cast, ​“Ana­lyt­ics Live: What Is SAP Data Telling You About Your Busi­ness Today?” Or join us in Atlanta for our BI+Analytics Con­fer­ence com­ing up in March.