Thursday, April 25, 2024

Customer Success – Britvic – Connecting SAP Analytics Cloud to Snowflake

Britvic plc is an international soft drink business rich in history and heritage. Founded in England in the 1930s, it has grown into a global organisation producing and distributing 39 brands in more than 100 countries, with manufacturing operations in Great Britain, Brazil, France and Ireland. Britvic has embarked on a mission to consolidate data into a centralized Snowflake data lake to extend the value of internal data by complementing it with external data. They implemented SAP Analytics Cloud as their data visualization tool, but soon ran into performance issues with importing data from Snowflake into SAP Analytics Cloud.

Requirements

• Live data connectivity to Snowflake Data Cloud
  Eliminate data latency of import connections and warehouses
• High-performance with large data sets
  Future proof connectivity in the face of continuous data growth
• Multiple data assets – SAP & non-SAP
  Ability to connect live to SAP BW, Snowflake and potentially other data assets as needed

Without live data connectivity, financial and operational analysts were unable to work efficiently with current data.

Solution: APOS Data Gateway for Snowflake

A Customer Success Partner at SAP suggested this customer contact APOS and look at the APOS Data Gateway for Snowflake solution. After APOS performed Proof of Concept, this organization implemented the APOS solution, which gave them:

• SSO-integrated middleware handling connection, preparation, consumption
  Transparent data virtualization, data transformation, and data consumption
• High-performance live data connectivity to Snowflake Data Cloud
  Queries on terabytes of data returned with rapid response times
• Secure, governed access to data
  Leveraging security and data modelling on data assets to enforce existing data governance

Outcomes

With APOS Data Gateway for Snowflake Britvic achieved:

• A path forward with Snowflake Data Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud that accounts for current and future use cases
• High-performance live data connectivity with Snowflake Data Cloud and legacy SAP BW
• Integrated security with SSO and support for Snowflake roles-based data access
• Self-service analytics with APOS views created in the Data Gateway’s semantic layer

Feedback

“Live Data Gateway resolved a major issue we had with continued use of SAP Analytics Cloud. We experienced limitations in the way SAP Analytics Cloud handled visualizations on large imported data sets from Snowflake. We had built up a big repository of data imports and after a while, that was causing a problem in itself, just the size of the data repository. Live data connectivity with APOS Live Data Gateway provided a path forward, allowing us to fulfill current SAP Analytics Cloud use cases and build new ones. The success of the Data Gateway’s integrated authentication and SSO with the Snowflake security model has been very helpful, and we have not even had to revisit settings since deployment.”
Paul Carey, Business Solution Manager - Information & Analytics, Britvic