Why Your SAP Business Warehouse Requires an Imminent Upgrade and How Google Cloud & Pluto7 Can Help

Blog / Why Your SAP Business Warehouse Requires an Imminent Upgrade and How Google Cloud & Pluto7 Can Help

In the digital age, the ability to harness vast amounts of data swiftly and effectively is not just an advantage; it’s a necessity for survival. For businesses entrenched in SAP environments, the challenge is not just about managing data growth—it’s about transforming this data into actionable insights that drive strategic decisions and competitive superiority. This is where the real power of modernizing your SAP Business Warehouse with Google Cloud comes into play, and Pluto7’s expertise can be your guide.

Whether it’s enhancing operational efficiency, achieving faster data processing, or unlocking innovative analytics capabilities, transitioning to a modern cloud-based architecture is imperative. But what does this journey involve, and how can Google Cloud and Pluto7 facilitate a seamless and successful transformation? This article delves into the nuances of this transition, offering a clear and strategic roadmap tailored for SAP users.

From Legacy to Leading-edge

As SAP BW nears its end of life and the limitations of traditional SAP BW become increasingly apparent, the need for a strategic overhaul is undeniable. The phased solution roadmap we recommend includes:

• Real-time Data Migration: Transitioning from SAP ECC to Google Cloud’s BigQuery enables real-time data analytics, reducing the gap between data collection and insight generation.
• Independence from SAP BW: Migrating critical data elements from SAP BW to BigQuery ensures continuity and scalability in business operations.
• AI-Enhanced Processes: Leveraging AI technologies, such as Generative AI agents, transforms supply chain management by improving inventory accuracy, dynamic pricing models, and financial planning. 

Navigating the Roadblocks on Your Path to Modernization

While you prepare to transition your SAP Business Warehouse to Google Cloud, it is important to understand the full spectrum of challenges you face. Here’s a breakdown of the challenges, each of which plays a critical role in shaping your modernization strategy:

• Fragmented Data Pipelines: Your system might currently utilize both SAP BW and various other analytics tools, leading to fragmented and inconsistent data pipelines. This fragmentation hampers effective data synthesis and analysis across platforms.
• Diverse Source Systems: The presence of multiple source systems adds complexity, often resulting in issues with data accuracy and timeliness that compromise decision-making.
• Process Monitoring Gaps: A significant drawback in many legacy systems is the lack of real–time process monitoring. This limitation often means failures are only detected after causing operational disruptions, making proactive management difficult.
• Delayed Data Refreshes: Existing SAP ECC/BW configurations may not support real-time data refresh, limiting your ability to make informed decisions quickly in response to changing market or operational conditions.
• End of Life for SAP BW: SAP BW is approaching its end of support, creating a pressing need for migration to avoid potential disruptions and ensure continued compliance and security.
• Post-Upgrade Compatibility: Transitioning from SAP ECC to S/4 HANA can introduce compatibility issues with your existing SAP BW, necessitating careful planning and execution to ensure seamless integration and functionality post–upgrade.
• Complex Change Management: Modernizing your SAP environment involves significant changes not just in technology but also in people and processes. Effective change management is essential to minimize disruption and resistance, ensuring a smooth transition across your organization.

Implementing a Scalable Data Strategy with Google Cloud and Pluto7

Learn more about Planning in a Box 

As your organization embarks on modernizing your SAP Business Warehouse, the future state envisioned by Pluto7 and Google Cloud focuses on creating a more streamlined, efficient, and scalable data environment. Here’s how we will transform your data systems:

• Incremental Scale Down of SAP BW: We will gradually reduce your reliance on SAP BW, shifting essential functions to scalable cloud solutions. This approach minimizes disruption while maximizing flexibility and efficiency.
• Centralization of SQL Servers on GCP BigQuery: We will consolidate your SQL servers into BigQuery. This centralization streamlines your data processing and analytics, reducing overhead and enhancing operational efficiency.
• Centralization of Source Systems: We will unify multiple data sources into a single, cohesive model in BigQuery. This integration not only improves data accessibility and quality but also eliminates inconsistencies across your data landscape.
• Reduced Dependence on SAP BW Systems: As we lower your dependence on traditional SAP BW systems, your organization will gain the agility to adopt advanced technologies and methodologies like real-time analytics and machine learning, natively supported by Google Cloud.

The Evolution Toward Decision Intelligence

Activating Decision Intelligence: The Pluto7 Framework

We did the groundwork, which is crucial for this next step—harnessing the power of decision intelligence. This is where your data begins to actively work for you, transforming insights into automated decision–making loops that are both reliable and dynamic.

Decision Intelligence is the art and science of making automated decisions supported by data you can trust, with a human in the loop to ensure relevance and accuracy. It’s about making your data speak in ways that directly inform business strategies and operational efficiencies.

Here’s how we’ll do it with the Pluto7 approach:

Step 1: Adopting a Multi-Phase Approach

We begin with a multi-phase approach that offers a multitude of benefits, enhancing data accessibility, improving data quality, and empowering data-driven decision-making across your organization.

Step 2: Enhanced Data Accessibility and Simplicity

Next, we adopt the one-data-hub ideology to centralize all data sources into a single, cohesive platform. This centralization simplifies data management, ensures uniformity, and lays the groundwork for advanced analytics.

Step 3: Improved Data Quality

With a centralized data hub in place, we focus on improving data quality. We engage advanced data quality tools and techniques to cleanse, transform, and enrich your SAP data, ensuring it is accurate and reliable for critical decision-making.

Step 4: Real-Time Data Integration and Insights

Finally, we implement real-time data processing capabilities. This enables your organization to make informed decisions promptly, allowing you to respond quickly to market changes and internal demands.

Unlock Your Data’s Potential: Fit Gap Analysis Workshop

The Fit Gap Analysis is an essential part of your Data Foundation assessment. As part of this analysis, the SAP BW extracts are mapped with Google Cloud Cortex Reporting Views. The objective is to identify how much of the SAP BW Tables schema already exists as part of our pre-built data model and how much additional customization would be needed.

To kickstart this process, we invite you to join a 1-hour workshop with us. During this session, we will review your current setup, discuss your objectives, outline the Fit Gap Analysis process, and plan the next steps. This workshop will provide valuable insights and set the stage for a successful transition to a decision intelligence platform.