.avif)
Customer & challenge
Aachener Grundvermögen (AG) is a property capital management company. They have been in business for over 50 years with a focus on first-class retail properties in top inner-city locations.
AG and its subsidiary, AC+X Strategic Investments GmbH, want future generations to experience inner cities as lively urban spaces. By investing in retail and other activity options, they help preserve the value of these places and their established real estate. To improve their own efficiency in achieving this vision, AG is investing in the adoption of digital innovations that provide a uniform knowledge base for all employees.
As part of these digitalization measures, AG sought to implement Snowflake as a cloud hosted DWH, with Microsoft Power BI as a business intelligence solution. Vanessa Kremer from the Innovation/Digitization/IT Department of AG explained, “We wanted to make data from different sources available in a central location. That way, it could be further transformed, analyzed, and ultimately used to drive data-informed decisions.”
To achieve this goal, extracting data from SAP ERP 6.0 into Snowflake would need to be done on a daily basis. Vanessa Kramer continued: “It was clear to us from the outset that this would only be possible if we could ensure automated data transfer from SAP to Snowflake using a dedicated interface.”
"With Xtract Universal as the interface and Snowflake as the central DWH, we can analyze SAP data internally with Power BI in just a few minutes. We used to need up to two days and an external service provider to do this."
Solution with Xtract Universal
Because of Theobald Software’s reputation as an expert for SAP interfaces, AG choose Xtract Universal as the SAP data integration tool. Being a stand-alone solution, Xtract Universal was a convenient option because it did not require any additional hardware or development effort. This was important as AG wanted to rapidly prototype a solution.
Now in production, AG uses Xtract Universal as their SAP to Snowflake extraction tool. From there, the extracted raw data is made available for further processing with Power BI. Individual extracts can be pre-filtered or edited in advance.
Kremer added: “We use Airflow, an orchestration tool for automating and monitoring data pipelines using DAGs, together with the Xtract Universal’s Web API to launch the extracts created in Xtract Universal so that the corresponding SAP tables are exported to Snowflake.”
