The Brains Behind Innovation: Unlocking Actionable Insights with your SAP and Non-SAP Data in Google Cloud

A major component of business is identifying and solving problems. In fact, the value of most products and services directly correlates to the difficulty of the problem they solve for customers. That said, what problems or challenges are you tackling in your organization? No matter how big or small these problems are, you need insights to inform your decisions and produce innovative solutions.

Think back to a time when you got an insight—one that seemingly came out of nowhere—that helped you solve a difficult problem. You probably started by asking yourself a “how” question, thought long and hard about the solution, maybe even did some research, and then stopped thinking about the problem altogether. And while you were off doing something else, that’s when you got the insight that helped solve the problem. (For me, this usually happens while I’m exercising.)

If you ever wondered what causes this phenomenon, look no further than the supercomputer between your ears. Let me explain.

Brain Power

The super-computer known as the human brain never stops working. And, when it comes to solving the most difficult problems, your brain does its heavy lifting when you stop spending mental energy thinking about viable solutions. It’s during this mental downtime your brain makes connections between past experiences, stored knowledge, research, and other data points to produce the insight or idea that seemingly came out of nowhere.

The same process is at work when a chess master intuitively predicts his opponent’s next move or a seasoned detective notices something suspicious in a crime scene. It’s all thanks to the brain’s ability to process copious amounts of data from disparate sources to produce insights that drive effective decision-making and problem-solving.

Now ask yourself this: what if your organization had a solution, a “digital brain” if you will, that could produce insights and make predictions through the ingestion and integration of your SAP data, non-SAP data, and other third-party data? How would that transform your business? For starters, your copious amounts of enterprise data would finally become an asset. Your company would also have a huge advantage over competitors struggling to solve the toughest problems in your industry without a “brain” like yours.

Building A “Digital Brain” to Harness SAP and Non-SAP Data

So, what exactly is this “digital brain” enterprises lack when it comes to harnessing their data? The “digital brain” many organizations lack is called a Cloud data platform. Like a brain, the function of a Cloud data platform is to take in and integrate data from disparate sources to unlock insights and predict outcomes.

If you’re wondering how to implement a centralized Cloud data platform that integrates your SAP and non-SAP data, Lemongrass has the solution. We call it: Lemongrass SAP Analytics Accelerators. This solution is built around Google Cloud Cortex Framework with Google BigQuery.

Google Cloud Cortex Framework is a comprehensive approach to reducing the risks, complexity and cost of innovation in the Cloud through scenario-driven architectures, accelerators and integration services. Google Big Query on the other hand is Google’s serverless and highly scalable Cloud data warehouse that can help SAP customers easily and cost-effectively combine SAP and other data sets to gain the insights that enable effective decision-making and drive better business outcomes. Our Analytics Accelerators leverage both Google Cloud Cortex Framework with Google BigQuery and Google Looker to build Cloud data platforms on Google Cloud in a relatively short amount of time. Here’s a closer look at how it works.

The Lemongrass SAP Analytics Accelerators solution utilizes processes from Ingest, Data Modeling, Analytics & Visualization as-a-service to build an end-to-end innovation offering. By using pre-defined data models and combining master with transactional data to enable self-service reporting while providing SAP business logic layered on top of Google Cloud Cortex Framework with Google BigQuery, our SAP Analytics Accelerators helps you realize 50-70% faster development cycles at 60-75% lower cost. The best part about this solution is that it can help you realize those benefits in a fraction of the time it would take to do so without it.

Without the pre-defined data models from Google Cloud and Lemongrass, as well as the end-to-end skills that are part of the Lemongrass SAP Analytics Accelerators, implementing a Cloud data platform with faster development cycles and lower cost than legacy platforms could take up to 6-9 months.

Our Analytics Accelerators offering helps drive these outcomes in as short as 4-6 weeks (we don’t call it Analytics Accelerators for no reason). The business case of creating dashboards with real-time updates from SAP and non-SAP data in Google BigQuery and gaining valuable insights in such a short period of time makes the implementation of this solution viable for organizations. If it took 6-9 months, however, the cost and complexity of this implementation would be more trouble than it’s worth.

In addition to accelerating time-to-value for business outcomes, the Lemongrass SAP Analytics Accelerators solution is also extremely flexible. Since the Cloud data platform this solution helps organizations implement is essentially the brain that produces insights and makes predictions, all it needs is SAP and non-SAP data to run. This means that there is no need to undergo a migration of your SAP workloads to Google Cloud to reap the benefits of a Google Cloud data platform.

Your SAP workloads can remain either on-premises, or in a different hyperscale Cloud, while your Google Cloud Data Platform produces the insights you need to address internal and market-facing challenges.

Use Cases for a Google Cloud Data Platform by Lemongrass

Now that we’ve established the value of our SAP Analytics Accelerators offering, what are some of the data sets you can leverage to draw better insights from a Cloud data platform built on Google Cloud?

For starters, you can leverage data from Google Search Trends, Google Ads, Google Maps as well as publicly available data sets like NOAA weather data. The Google Cloud marketplace also has over 200 curated data sources ready to be leveraged directly in Google BigQuery. This presents a massive opportunity for your “digital brain” to ingest data from disparate sources to produce powerful insights quickly—a feat your competitors can only dream of without a Cloud data platform.

Not every Google data source will be relevant to producing insights for your organization, as you only need specific insights from your Cloud data platform to help solve challenges within your operations and your market. Here are a few industry-focused use cases for Cloud data platforms built on Google Cloud.

Manufacturing and Consumer Products

Manufacturing and consumer products organizations can optimize their supply chain and inventory processes by integrating the significant amounts of data sitting in their SAP environments and non-SAP systems on a Cloud data platform built-in Google Cloud. By getting all their data in BigQuery then visualizing it on Google Cloud Looker, business leaders in the manufacturing industry can receive valuable insights to better manage their business, reduce overall cost, and improve timelines around the availability of products and goods.

Retail

A retail organization can derive insights from plugging SAP Data sources into Google BigQuery and combining the data with Google Search Trends, for example, to better understand customer buying behaviors. With insights into customer buying behavior, retail organizations can position their products in the market at the right time, optimize the costs of their products to maximize profits, and run more effective promotions to increase sales volumes. With a Cloud data platform, retailers can also reduce shelf-outs with predictive forecasting.

Start the Conversation

At Lemongrass, we pride ourselves on being the world’s best at deploying, implementing, migrating, operating, and automating traditional SAP workloads in the Cloud. Simply put, we help companies run better, faster, and more efficiently in the Cloud. And, although we excel at helping customers realize greater agility and cost savings running SAP in the Cloud, we know those are not the biggest value-adds of Cloud technology.

The biggest value-add of running your SAP workloads in the Cloud is unlocking innovation—doing something new or different to solve business problems. Implementing a Cloud data platform to draw powerful insights from your SAP and non-SAP data is a step in that direction.

We welcome the opportunity to engage with you and your leadership team in a Google Cloud Data Platform Discovery Workshop Session. In this session, our experts will brainstorm around industry use cases and problems you can solve with the Lemongrass Analytics Accelerators for SAP. And if your organization is like many of the other organizations we engage with on this Cloud data platform topic, you will be amazed at the problems that can be solved and the insights that you can gain in a short period of time after implementing your very own Cloud data platform.