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SAP HANA EFFECT
Title: Episode 11 - Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at
TOMS Shoes (Duration: 18:10)
Publish Date: April 6, 2015
Description: Rita Lefler walks us through how TOMS Shoes has
revolutionized their reporting infrastructure with a rapid Business
Warehouse on HANA project.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL
FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEFF:
Welcome to The HANA Effect. I’m your host, Jeff
Word, from SAP. Each week, we bring listeners the
real stories of how companies are taking advantage
of real-time computing to transform their
organizations and let them share the lessons they’ve
learned along their journey. Welcome to another
episode of The HANA Effect. I’m your host, Jeff Word
from SAP, and I’m joined today by Rita Lefler from
TOMS Shoes. Rita, welcome.
RITA:
Thank you.
JEFF:
Before we get started, why don’t you tell us a little
bit about yourself and your role…
RITA:
I joined Tom’s Shoes back in 2013 as a Global BI Director.
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 1 JEFF:
You guys have been working with HANA for a few
months now. You’ve had one really big HANA
project. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about
how TOMS Shoes got started working with Hana.
RITA:
Back in 2013, TOMS Shoes implemented SAP, but it was
lacking of reporting, so business intelligence program
wasn’t completed at that time. So, when we start
evaluating how to bring business intelligence in the
company, how to make operational decisions in more
efficient way, we were thinking about SAP BW. And we
decided that we want to build BW on HANA. So, we
constantly have this challenge in the business where we
need to analyze data at a very detailed level and also be
very agile with our analysis. We can’t really build very
static models. We’re constantly changing the way we look
at the product. We add new products and we thought
HANA would actually deliver us this agility.
JEFF:
So, basically, you wanted to look at an enterprise
data warehouse but you needed the speed and
capability from the HANA engine underneath it.
RITA:
We needed both. We needed HANA engine capability to
give us speed, but we also needed agility, the BW model
and making sure that we can really quickly address new
business challenges or business questions without going
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 2 into the back end and changing our model. So, with HANA
and specifically BW on HANA 7.4, there is simplified
approach on the data modeling and a lot of layers got
removed. So what we could do now, our time to market is
a lot faster than it would be with traditional BW.
JEFF:
That’s actually very important, especially in your
business that has all of these really critical issues
that come up from a retail perspective. You have to
be able to see those and react quickly.
RITA:
Yes. And it’s not just from the retail perspective. It’s also
planning and forecasting and how do we buy? What
models we have to invest in and from the operational
perspective even from our own operations, we have to
constantly look from the different angles. So many other
questions too, so we want to know how the style is
performing in the season, beginning of the season or how
similar styles were performing last year but because we
are not thorough footwear solution, so we don’t have the
same product selling every year, so we have new product,
introduce seasonal product, and sometimes we have to
look at them differently than they looked four months ago
at the similar product. So, we need that agility to be able
to produce different result and produce different models in
our BW system. So, with HANA, BW on HANA, we have this
ability. We can really quickly connect the data with new
composite info providers and the ability to join the data on
the fly, we speed up our delivery to the business.
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 3 JEFF:
So, it’s not just about the speed and the flexibility of
HANA, but it’s about the speed and agility that the
business users now have and the flexibility that they
have to ask the questions and dig deeper to solve
the business issues, yeah?
RITA:
Exactly. It’s that agility and reducing that development
lifetime.
JEFF:
Can you give us an example of the before world and
after world once you went to BW on HANA?
RITA:
In the before world, the traditional BW we would have
really static model. So, we would load the delta into the SL
layers, then we would create cubes and then we create
multiple cubes on top of the DSO. So, each one would be
aggregated at specific function so that the way that you
would have, for example, dashboard, you would have
specific cube attached to that dashboard for the
performance and improved performance of running that.
And then now you mentioned, when you have multiple
cubes in the same actually data, so every time you want to
change something in the underlying data, you have to
either reload the data, you have to change all your
transformation, you have to make sure all your cubes,
everywhere that you have an impact in the chain have to
be changed. And so, it’s a long process to just make some
small changes on the back end. So now, with BW on
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 4 HANA, first of all, we don’t have cubes anymore. So, we
have just one layer because it gives us the speed and then
we now we have this agility to create virtual providers,
which do not store any data. We can join the data
virtually, so it’s really easy to have just one layer where
the data is stored and if it needs to be changed, it’s
changed in one place only, and then you virtually can
actually produce results that you need for the business.
Another benefit of HANA and speed is the data loads. So, if
the data loads before would take 8 or 10 hours, now all
our data loads take within 2 hours and certain info
providers we can load within minutes. So, what does it do
for business now? So, let’s say we’re in the month end
close and users want to refresh the data during the day,
we would never be able to do that before HANA. Now, we
can say, hey, okay, we can refresh it to you. It takes a few
minutes, no impact on the business, nobody really even
notice anything and they can have data refreshed. So,
saying that, we don’t have real-time application. We don’t
have HANA get real-time data. But even with the DW,
we’re almost able to provide them near real-time results
when they need it. So, it’s on demand. We’re able to
refresh data on demand.
JEFF:
That’s a huge, huge shift from the nightly batch ETL
and loading and things like that and then you come
in in the next morning and massage and restructure
and things like that before it’s available. Now, you
guys can do the actual physical import very, very
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 5 quickly, which allows you to spend most of your time
on making the data more useful to the business,
right?
RITA:
We still do nightly batch, preloads. And we want to keep
data consistently through the day, so our loads are still
nightly. They shortened, so now instead of 8-10 hours, so
our window is like 2 hours. In addition to that, in this
specific situation, it’s just an exception and when user
want the data to be refreshed in exception situation, we
could do it really quick. Or, let’s say, we have exception
situation when data loads fail during the night and we
come in the morning, 6 or 7 a.m. in the morning, and
we’re fixing that and we want to reload data, the data
variable almost immediately after we fix. In the traditional
BW without the HANA, users would probably experience
some downtime because we would fix it and then they
would have to wait for the load to complete.
JEFF:
Let’s talk a little bit about the size of this data
problem that you’ve got. Can you give us a little idea
of what the size of your warehouse is today and kind
of the data volumes that you’re dealing with now on
HANA?
RITA:
In HANA, currently we have 250 gigabytes. We’re in the
medium size HANA appliance, and we almost reach the
max. So, we’re thinking about implementing next either
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 6 near line storage and also upgrading to more HANA
memory.
JEFF:
Okay. So, you guys aren’t really a big massive, big
data problem. It’s not necessarily that you have lots
of data, it’s just that you need the data quickly and
needs to be flexible in order to do the types of
analysis that your users want.
RITA:
So, again, we are medium size company.
JEFF:
Tell us a little bit, if you can, about the project when
you rolled out BW on HANA, a little bit about the
resources and the types of activities and then maybe
also how long it took and some of the interesting
things you found out during the process.
RITA:
So, we have started our project migrating on HANA
beginning of 2014, and our challenge was that we wanted
to migrate our existing BW system on HANA but also bring
up and develop a new content, and we had a specific
deadline for the new content. So, we needed our plan to
flow with migration and development and meet our
deadline. So, the way we decided to do that because we
couldn’t freeze our development environment for too long,
we have installed HANA on sandbox. And we spent about a
month to migrating on the sandbox and testing. And so,
the challenges we experienced at that time is that BW on
HANA was so new and the support pack was lower than we
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 7 needed. And so, we basically spent a little bit more time to
get into the highest support pack. And so, the
recommendation for anybody who would go through the
same route, before you do it, you have to be on the latest,
latest support pack for BW on HANA.
JEFF:
That’s really good advice and something also SAP
highly recommends. Can you give us an idea of how
long the project took?
RITA:
It took us to do all the testing in the sandbox and play in
the sandbox and making sure all our migration is
successful and all our reports are tested in a sandbox. And
then when we brought development down for the
migration, it took us two weeks for the full HANA
migration, development, and QA boxes including the
testing. The special focus was given to digression testing.
And, in this period, the migration itself would take only two
days, but the testing is where all the time spent. So we
have to test all the reports, the data loads, and change
management, moving objects from development to key,
which was really important and object development. So,
you could find some issues where your reports are okay,
but when you’re trying to move BW object from one
environment to another environment, you might have
some problems. And we found a couple nodes to fix that.
So, after the two weeks, we just have to wait for the right
time to move the production. We actually did the
production migration to HANA over the weekend. And to all
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 8 the users, it was treated like just a normal system
upgrade. So, we never run in the parallel environment. We
only had production unavailable for the weekend Saturday
and Sunday, but you also have to consider that our
database size was not as high at that time and the
development was frozen only for two weeks. This is what it
took us to get from development to QA and tested. So
about resources, all it’s been done in small team was one
internal resource and two consultants and within those two
consultants, we also were developing new content. So, it
wasn’t just a HANA migration but we also were doing data
modeling, and building in development new data models.
JEFF:
So, this was a pretty bare bones team that did a
huge amount of effort in a very short amount of
time.
RITA:
Yes, so that’s the BW team. We had another team for IT,
who are hosting our hardware. And so, we had the team
there that was the basis and database team who actually
were doing database migration.
JEFF:
So, what kind of things can you tell us that may have
been surprising to the team as you guys were going
through that project?
RITA:
A couple of things were surprising. Yeah, so we kind of had
some setbacks because we needed to do upgrade to the
different support pack. So, we had to go through upgrade
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 9 to support pack and we were at 740 first, before you do
the migration. So, we had to actually go and upgrade all
landscape to support pack. And then later on, we found
out that we need higher support pack. So, we had to go
through the whole upgrade again. But I don’t think this is
going to be a problem now; it’s been because BW on HANA
was too new at that time. I think now you could safely go
on the way to support pack once and then do your
migration as a second step.
So, the other surprises was after we went with BW on
HANA is learning how HANA database works and how
memory allocation works. And so, your basis team would
have to do a good job to actually make sure it’s all set up
properly. And they’re also making sure that you do the
system clean up prior going to BW on HANA, making sure
that your tables maintain only the data that you need, so
making sure that all the log files are clean and PSA clean
and keep it clean so you don’t get data that’s not needed
in the system. Also making sure that what’s stored in the
column store, table, sources store tables, so all this has to
be taken into consideration for better performance and
better use of the appliance that you have.
JEFF:
That’s really, really good advice and I might also add
that since the time that even you guys went live,
there’s been a huge additional development in the
cookbook for advice for going through these projects
and preparing for them. So, for listeners that are
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 10 interested in this, there’s a whole page on that on
the SAP community on SCN. That is a great place to
start to get ahead learning about these things. So,
let’s move onto a little bit more now that you guys
have got this up and running. It’s been going for a
while. Where do you guys see TOMS next
evolutionary steps in the HANA world?
RITA:
So, now, when we’re on HANA, this is just the beginning
and so in our evolution now, we want to get more into the
visualization and business intelligence. So, we’re installing
Lumiere right now and we’re playing with Lumiere and how
we can start telling our data discovery story through the
Lumiere and visualization and having users to actually
explore the data through ability of fast on the HANA
database.
JEFF:
So, going way beyond just the standard reporting
into visualizations and other really high value added
data discovery?
RITA:
Yes. So, we’re going into data discovery and we enable
faster time to insight analysis and accelerating decision
making. We also know that we have ability to replace
some complex data model with new ability with built in
composite info provides and so, we’re taking full
advantage of that. Next thing we also want to do, we want
to have some insights and real-time and we can build
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 11 some data model on HANA that will be independent from
BW schema.
JEFF:
Okay. That’s phenomenal. What are you guys
planning on the more transactional side with ERP?
RITA:
With ERP, we would like to build some analysis, especially
for the finance and it seems like we got a lot of requests
from finance during the month end close when they
analyzed the data and the line items and they needed this
at real-time. So, we would build some financial reporting
with the deep dive analysis for finance as a first step. Then
we could see the customer analytics, so when we can
connect to our e-commerce database and run some
customer analytics and 360 degree customer view. That
would be really impactful.
JEFF:
So, any other words of wisdom you’d like to share
with other companies that are considering going
down the BW on HANA route?
RITA:
Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned the cookbook because we
actually use that cookbook and it was really, really helpful.
So, that’s something that should not be ignored. The team
experience is invaluable, especially basis team experience
because the way the HANA database is managed is
different from other traditional databases. So, you want
somebody who has experience and can help you get
through that and through the system migration. Insure the
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 12 hands off and the specific abilities are understood between
infrastructure or basis or BW team because even if you
look at the cookbook, there are different steps are done by
different functional group. Some of them have to be done
by BW team and some of the basis and some of the
infrastructure. So, that needs to be clearly understood
before you start your implementation.
JEFF:
No, that’s absolutely critical and very, very good
advice for the folks considering this. I want to say,
first of all, thank you so much, Rita, for joining us
today. This has been phenomenal.
RITA:
You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me
here.
JEFF:
And for everyone listening, we’ll put some more
information about this on the blog at hana.sap.com.
You can always find out more information there and
make sure to follow us on iTunes and Soundcloud, so
that you can continue to get more great stories from
wonderful adopters of SAP HANA. So, thank you very
much again, Rita, for joining us today and we wish
TOMS Shoes a phenomenal success in the future not
only becoming a great company but also doing a lot
of great stuff to make the world a little bit better
place. So, thank you very much.
RITA:
Thank you.
HANA Effect Episode 12 – Walking through the Rapid Business Warehouse at TOMS Shoes 13