Faurecia wanted to take the plunge into the cloud with a large-scale project. With the help of TeamWork, it has laid the foundations for its new cloud data warehouse, based on SAP BW. The next step is to consolidate its three other data warehouses into this new data warehouse.
Faurecia is an automotive supplier with three core businesses: exhaust systems, vehicle interiors and seating. The acquisition of Japan’s Clarion in 2019 and the announced takeover of Germany’s Hella will enable us to move into new areas, such as lighting and on-board electronic solutions. This acquisition will make the French manufacturer the world’s 7th largest automotive equipment supplier, with annual sales of 23 billion euros and almost 150,000 employees.
The company currently has four SAP BW data warehouses, used daily by all the Group’s functions and plants: the American, Asian and European warehouses (one for each region) feed their data daily into a fourth, offering a global view of the Group’s data.
Faurecia’s project is designed to converge towards a single warehouse, which will become a key component of its analytical infrastructure. At the same time, Faurecia is considering the adoption of new SAP technologies: the SAP HANA database and SAP S/4HANA Intelligent ERP. So it was only logical that the company chose SAP BW on HANA as the heart of its new data warehouse. Un data warehouse cloud…
Why the Cloud?
“Above all, it’s a strategic choice. We absolutely had to put a foot in the cloud in a significant way, through an essential brick of the organization. The data warehouse is an excellent candidate: it’s not as critical as an ERP, but it’s large enough for us to be able to assess the stakes and benefits of a move to cloud strategy. It was this idea that led to the choice of deploying SAP BW in cloud mode. “
Pierre ollivier
Director, IT Application Center of Excellence, Faurecia
Faurecia launched a call for tenders to find a partner capable of supporting it in this project. While retaining project management, the aim was to increase the skills of in-house teams in the field of cloud computing.
A project supported by SAP BW specialist TeamWork
TeamWork, selected as a partner in October 2018, focused on coaching Faurecia teams and conducting the cloud tender during the 1st half of 2019. A contract was signed with Microsoft in the summer of 2019, and the Azure migration project began in September, with a switchover target of May 2020. However, the health crisis has postponed the go live of the new data warehouse to October 2020.
The project was divided into three stages. The first is to migrate the central instance, so that as many users as possible can benefit from the response times and availability of the new data warehouse. The second part of the project – scheduled for completion at the end of 2021 – involves merging the other three data warehouses into a single SAP BW instance. Then to merge the two SAP BW/4HANA instances thus created into one, during 2022.
“TeamWork was able to acculturate our teams to the Microsoft Azure environment and answer all our questions. The TeamWork teams were extremely responsive and adaptable. “
Pierre ollivier
Director, IT Application Center of Excellence, Faurecia
A very open cloud data warehouse
As far as availability and performance are concerned, we’ve kept our promises, thereby dispelling some of the reservations about moving critical systems to the cloud. With the advantage of flexibility, test or development instances can be created without delay and without heavy investment.
“Today, we use SAP Business Objects (BI 4, Web Intelligence, Lumira), as well as MicroStrategy solutions and Microsoft PowerBI. SAP HANA offers better connectivity with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud, but not only that. It’s an offering capable of opening up to third-party BI solutions.”
Pierre ollivier
Director, IT Application Center of Excellence, Faurecia
This opening has enabled Faurecia to build an analytical system combining two solutions from different vendors: SAP for the data warehouse and Palantir Technologies for its data platforms.
With this project, Faurecia has implemented one of the pillars of its data platform strategy, and acquired the cloud experience needed to prepare the next stages of its transition to SAP S/4HANA.
