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Customer & challenge
With its subsidiaries in Germany and Canada, the Mercer International Group is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of long-fiber market pulp.Mercer manages the largest sawmill in Germany with a sawn timber capacity of 1.3 million cubic meters. Around 2,300 employees work for thegroup. In addition, valuable biochemicals, such as tall oil, are extracted during pulp production. The two German pulp mills also happen to be two of the largest biomass power plants of their kind in Germany. Mercer is the largest purchaser of wood in Germany.
Every day, roundwood is delivered in large quantities to the Group’s sawmill in Saalburg-Ebersdorf/Thüringen, where it is automatically measured. The resulting measurement data, which includes the length, circumference, and curvature, forms the basis for a quality rating that impacts pricing when it comes to settling accounts with suppliers. Mercer had been using SAP BW to report on wood purchasing in the past. As a part of their Group-wide cloud strategy they wanted to map out on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). That is why Mercer began looking for an automated way to make the necessary raw data from SAP available in Google Cloud Storage.
Xtract Universal brings worlds together. The interface allows us to transfer data from SAP to Google Cloud without any fuss.
Solution with Xtract Universal
As Mercer is already successfully using a solution from Theobald Software to perform SAP data extractions for Group consolidation, the interface specialist was Mercer’s first port of call in the Group’s efforts to determine whether automated data transfer from SAP to Google Cloud is possible. A summary attempt was made at Mercer to manually transport a file from SAP to Google Cloud using Xtract Universal. The transfer worked, giving Mercer the confidence that Theobald Software could also develop an automated solution. The Theobald Software team didn’t need to be asked twice and set to work straightaway. After all, the growing importance of cloud computing means that Mercer isn’t the only company whose wish list includesdata exchange between SAP and Google’s hyperscaler platform. Within three months, Mercer had a production-ready Xtract Universal component that enables SAP data to be integrated into the target environment—Google Cloud Storage—as part of an automated process.
