Delivering timely and accurate data for AESSEAL with Qlik Data Integration

THE CHALLENGE

AESSEAL design and manufacture mechanical seals for global companies in process industries such as oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, and mining & minerals. Their customers use rotating equipment, such as pumps, motors, and mixers in their processes and require quality, reliable seals to prevent liquids and gases escaping.

In 2019, AESSEAL rolled-out a common Enterprise Resource Platform (ERP), SAPS/4HANA. It’s since then been implemented in 35 countries. While it has improved efficiency and had a positive impact, there are still parts of the company to be brought onto the ERP system and legacy data analytics reporting requirements to fulfil. To get round this, AESSEAL began extracting transactional data overnight and loading it into an Oracle data warehouse to be reported on through Qlik Sense.

“For the first few years of running SAP it worked absolutely fine. However, as the volume of data and the number of businesses we brought onto SAP grew, it was becoming unmanageable. The overnight process went from taking 30 minutes to a few hours. With operations in Canada and Australia, it meant somebody somewhere was always out of sync.”

Stuart Welsh, Head of Information Technology 

The company wanted to find a way massively reduce the time it took feed the Oracle data warehouse from SAP and began discussions with Climber.

THE APPROACH

We spent time to understand AESSEAL’s challenges and discussed how Qlik Data Integration (QDI) could automate and modernise the continuous update of their data warehouse. We also introduced them to SAP specialists within Qlik. As AESSEAL’s ERP was an on-premise solution, we recommended QDI rather than Qlik Cloud Data Integration (QCDI) and ran a proof of concept.

We knew some data sets were taking longer to refresh in the data warehouse than others, so we initially focused on the quick wins that would make the fastest impact; sales invoices and material classification data.

The combination of Climber and Qlik’s knowledge, alongside AESSEAL’s understanding of SAP, meant we were able to deploy QDI in just three days. It points to the existing SAP Core Data Services (CDS) views which have all the information needed to refresh the data warehouse.

“QDI now takes the change records from SAP every 30-minutes and they are put into a holding area. We then augment the data from SAP, but only for the changes that have come through. This means we are processing a very focused set of records more frequently, so we are more accurate. Reconciling reports has also become much easier because we know the data is timely.”

Stuart Welsh, Head of Information Technology 

THE RESULT

With QDI, the global sales teams can now find accurate and up-to-date data more quickly, giving them greater confidence. 

While AESSEAL still conducts a batch run for some data overnight, it now only takes 20 minutes rather than hours. AESSEAL do not need their data to be real-time, as it is technically historic data. However, if this changes in future, QDI will be able to provide this within the same technology stack. 

“Working with Climber massively helped us. Their whole consultative approach led us to where we are today.”

Stuart Welsh, Head of Information Technology