As a cohesive ERP solution, SAP is often one of the largest data resources in an organization, containing everything from financial and transactional data to master information about customers, vendors, materials, facilities, planning and even HR. But SAP has limited analytics capabilities, and directly ingesting SAP data into Snowflake can present a challenge. Changes to SAP’s warehousing strategy over time mean many customers may need to patch together and manage multiple technologies to extract data in a useful format. Even then, companies can struggle with latency and merge issues.

SNP Group is tackling this challenge head-on, leveraging the Snowflake Native App Framework (generally available on AWS and Azure, private preview on GCP) to create its SNP Glue Connector for SAP. Along with SNP Glue, the Snowflake Native App gives customers a simple, flexible and cost-effective solution to get data out of SAP and into Snowflake quickly and accurately.

Try SNP Glue Connector for SAP: Get it now!

Getting direct access to SAP data is critical because it holds such a breadth of ERP information. That data is an anchor resource for advanced analytics, predictive analytics and many other data-driven initiatives. 

For example, IoT data from factory floor sensors may be connected to a plant that’s represented by a location in SAP. Information about purchases made for that plant are within SAP. The work orders associated with maintaining the equipment and finding the right workers with the skill sets to manage it are all in SAP. That context is necessary for predictive maintenance initiatives — you need to know things like the equipment’s run rate, when it last failed, who worked on it, and when it was last maintained to create an accurate calculation.

To extract this data from SAP, customers went to their toolbox. They applied solutions like SAP BusinessObjects Data Services, Fivetran and Qlik, or used extractors to get SAP data into SAP BW and then attached more tools to get the data from SAP BW into other systems. While this successfully extracted the data, it came with trade-offs in latency, granularity and ability to get changed data or common data service (CDS) views. Those trade-offs became less acceptable as demand for near real-time data and analytics increased.

“SNP developed SNP Glue to unlock SAP data from SAP ECC, SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW sources so it could be used for other purposes, in whatever cloud or analytics platform they require,” says Joe Bartoletti, Head of Global SNP Glue GTM at SNP Group. 

Glue provides a simple, direct way for organizations with SAP systems to quickly and securely ingest SAP data into Snowflake. It sits on the application layer within SAP, which makes almost any structured data accessible and available for change data capture (CDC). Snowpipe Streaming allows Glue to get the data across to Snowflake very quickly. 

To improve the last mile of this process, SNP built a Snowflake Native App, called SNP Glue Connector for SAP. This native SAP connector cost-optimizes the ingestion of streaming SAP data volumes into Snowflake so customers can get near real-time data from SAP at a granular level, without unwanted transformations. 

SNP designed its Snowflake Native App to tackle the tedious and potentially expensive process of merging highly changing ERP data within Snowflake. It also gives organizations a view of the combined changed data, committed data and data within Snowflake. Customers can process changed data once or twice a day — or at whatever cadence they prefer — to the main table. SNP has been able to provide customers with a 10x cost reduction in Snowflake data processing associated with SAP data ingestion. 

“SNP Glue Connector for SAP puts the merge logic into an application wrapper, getting rid of the spaghetti code that customers previously used to address the ingestion and merge issues,” explains Bartoletti. “We now have an optimized connection so you can stream data over, drop it in Snowflake, and it’s immediately available at scale.” 

The benefits of SNP Glue Connector for SAP fall into three main categories: 

• Data availability: Customers get direct access to data in SAP and have it represented in Snowflake exactly the way it was represented in SAP. 
• Data frequency: Waiting overnight or every four hours for data to be processed into your systems may not be good enough for today’s initiatives. Real-time recommendation engines and AI-guided buying processes depend on up-to-date data.
• Cost of obtaining SAP data: Cost reductions extend beyond the potential processing savings within Snowflake. By enabling a direct connection between SAP and Snowflake, the SNP Glue Connector for SAP can also reduce the cost and complexity associated with extracting SAP data. This includes costs related to the middleware involved; the number of additional tools involved and their licensing costs; and the time and effort required to maintain the pipeline and its connections. 

As the pace of business increases, SNP and Snowflake customers can use the combination of SNP Glue and the Data Streaming for SAP Snowflake Native App to feed AI projects and data apps a constant influx of valuable SAP data. Many companies have been struggling with their current SAP data ingestion methods, which underscores the reason SNP created their Snowflake Native App: to provide a simple solution that plays well with SAP and doesn’t require extra licensing or violate runtime entitlements.

Visit SNP’s listing on Snowflake Marketplace and try out the SNP Glue Connector for SAP for free. To learn more about how the SNP Glue Connector for SAP works, watch our Powered by Snowflake video, Moving Data into Snowflake from SAP NetWeaver Using SNP Glue Connector.