Monday, March 11, 2024

Customer Success – Salling Group – APOS Data Gateway – Snowflake Data Cloud

Live data connectivity between SAP Analytics Cloud and Snowflake Data Cloud including SSO data access controlled by Customer

Salling Group is a large, Europe-based retailer running multiple chains of retail stores, and the largest retailer in Denmark. It has its roots in the original Salling department store, founded in 1906 by Ferdinand Salling. The company now owns 1600+ discount and premium grocery stores and 70 convenience stores with 65,000 employees in Denmark, Poland and Germany, including 1,500 working at corporate headquarters in Brabrand, Denmark.

Landscape & Challenge

Salling Group is an SAP shop. Back in 2018, they were using SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2, SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office, Lumira Designer and BEx. They performed a slow rollout of SAP Analytics Cloud in the years that followed and SAC is now the premier front-end analytical and reporting tool. At the same time, Salling had consolidated a large legacy of financial data covering the previous 10 years from a very large acquisition in Snowflake Data Cloud. They needed their analysts to have access to this data in SAP Analytics Cloud to extract KPI and other comparative data to drive better business decisions moving forward.

The Challenge:
SAP Analytics Cloud does not support SSO-based
live data connectivity with Snowflake Data Cloud.

Requirements

• SAP Analytics Cloud access to legacy data in Snowflake Data Cloud
• Single Sign-On (SSO) for analysts from SAP Analytics Cloud to Snowflake data
• Snowflake Data Cloud Roles compatibility

Salling Group & APOS Live Data Gateway

Salling Group was already an APOS customer as they continue to use the APOS Publisher solution with their SAP BusinessObjects deployment as a means to deliver timely daily sales figures and other information to all stores.

Together with APOS, Salling Group implemented new functionalities in APOS Live Data Gateway to provide SSO connections from SAP Analytics Cloud to Snowflake Data Cloud, giving them:

• Single Sign-On access from SAP Analytics Cloud to Snowflake Data Cloud
• Semantic layer views on Snowflake Data Cloud for simplified self-service analytics
• Use of Snowflake Data Cloud Roles to limit access to sensitive data and provide strong data governance

Feedback

“We had a need to provide easy business user access to different data sources, including on-premise SAP BW/4HANA and Snowflake Data Cloud, within a single reporting tool, SAP Analytics Cloud. It was essential that access was granted using Single-Sign On. APOS worked with the Salling Group to develop new SSO functionality in the Live Data Gateway product using a combination of SAML and OAuth2. This capability did not exist in the marketplace. APOS Live Data Gateway has made it possible for us to supply relevant data to business users within a familiar UI. APOS Live Data Gateway, together with these SSO capabilities, enables users to operate in a single reporting tool (SAP Analytics Cloud) without disturbance and regardless of the complexity of infrastructure and data storage models behind the data used for reporting."

Tommy Baunwall, Enterprise Architect
Mikael Skou Andersen, Business Process Manager & PO – Finance