Preparation tips for SAP BW HANA projects!

The groundbreaking opportunities and performance enhanced with the help of SAP BW HANA, made many to become SAP customers and dive into their first dip into the HANA pond with SAP BW on HANA. Consumers Energy has done just that in rolling out the data warehouse over the past seven months. But the project started long before that, in June 2014, and Consumers found that a smooth project requires preparation.

“HANA is not an answer for bad [data infrastructure] designs,” says Dinesh Bansal, BI and Analytics professional at Consumers energy, who presented at the SAP for Utilities conference in Huntington Beach last week. “If you are running BW you can’t just magically migrate to HANA and everything will be solved.”

Fix any poor designs before beginning a project, because what ran poorly on the legacy database will run poorly on HANA, he adds.

“When it comes to data, make sure it’s clean, clean, clean,” Bansal says. Look at older information and see what the company actually needs to keep. Consumers Energy was able to cut out four to five terabytes of data through this process, which saved big money when it came to buy the HANA appliance.

In addition to those technical steps, Bansal also recommends running a workshop before the project begins, where the project team can address a number of important questions and brainstorm solutions. For example: How do we minimize downtime?

Between three and six days of downtime is to be expected in a BW on HANA project, Bansal says. That’s three to six days where reports won’t be available to the business.

One way to cut downtime is to fix problems before they can happen on the go-live. To do this, the Consumers Energy team copied its production environment onto a sandbox, and then ran a dress rehearsal of the project to identify potential problems.

 “It’s very critical that you know how long the downtime will be,” he continues.

There are other important questions to answer in that pre-HANA workshop. For one, Bansal says companies should know exactly why they are buying HANA, if it will meet performance requirements, how HANA will fit into their existing data center infrastructure and what hardware will best fit their project.

But software and hardware shouldn’t be the only concerns. Companies should look at what a BW on HANA migration means for the operations team—they may be used to running an Oracle shop, and now need to be trained on HANA databases.

The bottom line: There is plenty of work to do before a BW on HANA project gets off the ground. “The pre-HANA workshop is very, very important for anybody,” Bansal stresses.