Acta Technology Ships Packaged Data Marts
for SAP R/3 Sales and Cost Analysis
ACTION ITEMS
Acta Technology, Inc., a leading provider of data warehousing solutions for packaged applications, has announced the general availability of two packaged data marts for SAP R/3 which greatly reduce the time and level of SAP and data warehousing expertise required to rapidly deploy an SAP data warehouse. In addition, the company announced the completion of its beta test program, which culminated in the sale of its new RapidMarts to Acuson Corporation, Integrated Device Technology (IDT), Maxtor Corporation and Shell Chemical.
Acta's RapidMarts for SAP provide an "out-of-the-box" warehouse solution that includes a target schema, source-to-target mappings and transformations that handle change data capture, hierarchy extraction, error recovery and other complex data warehouse processes. Each RapidMart contains pre-defined data extraction jobs that automatically populate the data warehouse with a company's SAP data. Implemented in days, RapidMarts are built with ActaWorks for SAP, Acta's graphical extraction, transformation and loading tool, and can easily be customized to meet each company's unique needs. Close integration with third-party BI/OLAP tools means very rapid deployment of business analysis for customers who run their business with SAP.
Maxtor Corporation, which develops, manufactures and markets desktop hard disk drives worldwide, recently deployed Acta's Sales Analysis RapidMart for SAP concurrently with several SAP R/3 applications. According to Paul Mathern, Maxtor's data warehouse project manager, the deployment of its RapidMart simultaneously with SAP was very important to Maxtor's business. "It's an important database that daily tells people what to ship, how much to ship and to whom," Mathern said.
Mathern said the customization of the RapidMart was a simple and straightforward process. "The Acta Sales Analysis RapidMart supplied us with a better than 70 percent solution out of the gate, which provided us a tremendous jump-start," he said. "In addition, we were able to customize the RapidMart to fit our business model in a matter of days-with no training-so we have been thrilled with Acta, ActaWorks and the Sales Analysis RapidMart."
"We ended up with a fairly complex database of more than 60 tables that we are populating," Mathern said. "Deploying this information in such a quick, timely manner without this application would have been very difficult."
"SAP customers are seeking a solution that enables them to simultaneously go live with SAP and a data warehouse in order to provide crucial reporting and analysis capabilities," said Acta President and CEO Carol Mills Baldwin. "Acta's RapidMarts provide an almost immediate return on investment. Instead of investing in a concept, business sponsors can instantly recognize the power of a data warehouse by easily performing complex analysis on their own data, thereby reducing the project risk and political exposure sometimes associated with data warehouse projects," Baldwin said.
Each Acta RapidMart addresses a different business analysis subject area, with the first two RapidMarts released by Acta focusing on sales analysis and cost analysis. RapidMarts for the areas of financial, inventory and human resources analysis will be available in the first quarter, 1999. Multiple RapidMarts can be integrated to create an enterprise data warehouse with shared dimension tables across RapidMarts. Each Acta RapidMart is composed of multiple components:
A star schema which allows for analysis of typical business problems for a specific subject area.
Data mappings and transformations for populating the data mart from SAP. These mappings embody knowledge of SAP's 10,000 table data schema and the business logic which relates to that data.
Full load and daily load jobs, including an incremental extraction strategy. Due to the high volumes of transactions typically processed by SAP, it is critical that only new transactions be extracted on a regular basis. Built-in error recovery. Should the data warehouse job fail, it is important that a company be able to recover quickly, without significant down-time for the data warehouse.
Acta's Sales Analysis (SA) RapidMart for SAP is a packaged data warehouse that enables SAP customers to easily track critical sales measurements such as revenue and quantity sold for orders booked, delivered and billed. Users can monitor sales trends, evaluate sales performance across territories, identify top customers, analyze their purchasing patterns and evaluate the effectiveness of promotional or marketing campaigns by "slicing and dicing" data across a number of dimensions such as product family and sales organization.
Acta's Cost Analysis (CA) RapidMart for SAP enables cost center, department and project managers to analyze actual, committed and budgeted expenses by cost center or project, which is often referred to as internal order within SAP. Where significant variances occur, users can easily drill down to view expense details by vendor or materials purchased to identify any potential problems. Based on historical trends, the Cost Analysis RapidMart enables managers to develop forward-looking projections of their costs as well.
Acta's RapidMarts can easily be customized to meet a company's specific business analysis needs utilizing ActaWorks for SAP. ActaWorks is the industry's first graphical ETL tool architected and developed from the ground up to be tightly integrated with SAP's application layer. To extract data from SAP, ActaWorks automatically generates optimized ABAP, SAP's 4GL, obviating the need to develop and maintain customized code. Common RapidMart enhancements include:
Integrating non-SAP data from different source systems including legacy, relational and external data.
Adding additional SAP data not pre-built into the RapidMart.
Modifying the data model to add dimensions, measurements, or characteristics important to the business.
Using ActaWorks' robust library of data transformations to calculate aggregates such as percentage change, product delivery lag, year-to-date figures and variances.
SAP installations continue to struggle to build a data warehouse infrastructure for their R/3 environments-one that will support both SAP and non-SAP data sources,” said Robert Craig, Director of the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Service at the Hurwitz Group. "Acta Technology has clearly demonstrated its ability to deliver business value to SAP installations by helping them populate and deploy data warehouses very quickly," Craig said. "The introduction of Acta's packaged RapidMarts will only help further accelerate the deployment process of SAP-based data warehouses."
Acta also announced the formation of its RapidMartReady Program to ensure companies can utilize their OLAP and business intelligence tools of choice to perform business analysis on RapidMart data. Due to ActaWorks' open metadata integration architecture, once companies have installed a RapidMart, implementing a front-end reporting and analysis environment is a straightforward process. Under the umbrella of the RapidMartReady Program, leading OLAP and business intelligence vendors have taken integration one step further, developing packaged reports and multidimensional cubes on top of Acta's RapidMarts. Companies who are currently RapidMartReady include Brio, Business Objects, CorVu, Hummingbird, Hyperion, Infospace, Microstrategy, and Seagate Software.
Acta's RapidMarts for Sales Analysis and Cost Analysis have completed beta testing and are available immediately.
Founded in October 1996, and headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Acta Technology is the data warehouse industry's first and only vendor focused exclusively on providing enterprise data warehouse solutions for packaged client-server applications. Initially focused on SAP, Acta's solutions include pre-packaged data marts built around the industry's only extraction, transformation and loading tool, ActaWorks, architected from inception to be very tightly integrated with SAP's application layer. Acta is a member of the SAP Complementary Software Program (CSP) and has signed a strategic OEM relationship with Cognos.
Privately held, Acta is funded by Greylock Limited Partnerships, Norwest Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. The company was founded by Sachin Chawla and Alex Gorelik, the architect and manager of Sybase, Inc.'s highly successful data movement software, Sybase Replication Server. Acta customers include Church & Dwight, the Arm & Hammer Company; S-B Power Tools, a division of Bosch GmbH; Janssen-Ortho, and Monsanto. For more information, visit Acta's World Wide Web site at http://www.acta.com