JD Group Case Study

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As part of its efforts to continue providing exceptional customer experiences, JD Group sought to improve its peak-period planning for warehouse efficiency. Recognizing it would need data-driven insights to realize this objective, the company kicked off a project to create a data lake house for their SAP and non-SAP data. The objective was to build a data lake on AWS as a foundation to enable JD Group to tap into AWS analytics services and enable data-driven decision-making for several initial u

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JD Group is a diversified retailer and consumer finance company headquartered in Sandton, South Africa. Catering to a wide range of customers, JD Group offers a comprehensive portfolio of furniture and household appliances.

Challenge

Although JD Group had a clear objective and a plan in place, extracting data out of SAP posed a significant challenge. The company also needed to fully understand the complexities of its underlying SAP data model structures. After several attempts to get this clarity with the help of different service providers, JD Group turned to Lemongrass for a specialized solution.

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Lemongrass began the engagement with a 2-week Proof of Concept (POC). During the POC, the Lemongrass team leveraged its comprehensive SAP Analytics Accelerators solution, which consists of prebuilt data marts specifically tailored for order-to-cash processes and retail industry KPIs that previously weren’t considered by JD Group, to demonstrate its expertise in data extraction. With the successful execution of the POC, JD Group gained the confidence it needed to move forward with Lemongrass’s solution.

“Working with Lemongrass has been instrumental in accelerating our data lake deployment and overcoming the challenges we faced with data ingestion. They presented us with a comprehensive SAP data analytics solution and their depth of SAP knowledge was an asset throughout the implementation.”

Dietz Meiring, CIO, JD Group

Solution

Lemongrass leveraged its proprietary Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP) Realtime (RT) Connector to extract data out of SAP ECC. Built using the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP, LCP RT Connector facilitates near real-time data replication from SAP environments to Amazon’s data lake foundation, Amazon S3, and subsequently orchestrates the loading of the data into Amazon Redshift, AWS’s Cloud data warehouse. Using this solution, Lemongrass enabled the real-time ingestion of JD Group’s SAP data to Amazon S3.

Lemongrass also deployed its SAP DataMart Accelerators to expedite JD Group’s order-to-cash data mart deployment. This approach drastically reduced the company’s deployment time from the typical 12 months to 3 months, allowing JD Group to seamlessly consolidate its SAP and non-SAP data sources and create a reliable and real-time model of its key business metrics.

Results

JD Group’s partnership with Lemongrass enabled the company to fast-track the deployment of a robust data lake foundation on AWS and resolve its lingering data ingestion issues at a fraction of the cost of other solutions in the market. The success of the implementation has enabled the company to break down data silos and unlock actionable insights that can be used to optimize peak period planning for warehouse efficiency. With its data fully sourced into the AWS platform, JD Group can further optimize its operations and enhance the experience of its customers by leveraging AWS analytics services like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

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