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Customer & challenge
Goldhofer is a global manufacturer of heavy-duty and special transport vehicles that is headquartered in Memmingen, Germany with subsidiaries in Germany, the UK, India, Ukraine, the USA, and the United Arab Emirates. Around 800 employees currently work for the Group, which was first mentioned in 1705 as a blacksmith. The product range includes high-quality and innovative solutions for heavy-duty and special vehicles and airport logistics. These include, for example, freight and aircraft tractors, lowloaders or heavy-duty modules, as well as a wide range of services, including digital ones, that are used by customers all over the world.
Goldhofer in part owes its market leadership as a recognized global player to its consistent focus on sustainability and continuous improvements in all areas, including in IT. The expert in special transport vehicle solutions decided to implement SAP S/4HANA and to professionalize its BI architecture, including: data warehouse automation, agile data modelling with Data Vault 2.0, and self-service BI with Microsoft Power BI.A related challenge was to efficiently and reliably provide large amounts of data from the growing number of different SAP modules for business intelligence and data analytics. To achieve these requirements Goldhofer wanted a standardized interface that was certified by SAP, which would be quick to implement without any development effort. Support for a daily batch loading process was a must, along with the ability to access SAP’s CoreData Services (CDS) views and handling delta data loads. Andreas Peter, who is responsible for business intelligence at Goldhofer Aktiengesellschaft, added: “We also wanted a solution that would allow all loading and export processes to be orchestrated centrally.
Xtract Universal offers exactly the functions that we need to automatically provide SAP data for BI and analytics. We were also impressed by the excellent support that we received during the trial period and the detailed online help with answers to all the questions that have come up so far.
Solution with Xtract Universal
Xtract Universal offered a convincing solution that was precisely focused on extracting SAP data to satisfy various requirements. Andreas Peter noted: “The interface offers functions for exporting master and transaction data, change data capture for master data, delta loading of transaction data as well as for using SAP Queries and exporting the results with Xtract Universal. This is the exact range of features that we need to provide SAP data for BI and perform data analytics tasks.” Goldhofer invested around four weeks to put the interface through its paces with the free trial version. Andreas Peter continued: “The support that we received during the trial period was very good. We had various questions, which were answered competently within avery short time. We quickly noticed that the team had experience and know-how both in terms of SAP and the data environment in the context of BI and data analytics."
