Monsanto Company Selects Acta Technology's ActaWorks
to Build SAP R/3-Based Decision Support Repository
ACTION ITEMS
As reported by Scott Humphrey of Humphrey Strategic Communications, Acta Technology, Inc., a leading provider of data warehousing solutions for packaged applications, has announced that Monsanto Company, the $7.5 billion life sciences company, has purchased, tested and deployed ActaWorks, Acta's award-winning SAP R/3-to-data warehouse extraction, transformation and loading tool.
Monsanto is using ActaWorks to extract sales and finance data from SAP R/3 to build an Oracle-based enterprise data warehouse-its Decision Support Repository-from which Monsanto's IT divisions will build data warehouses and data marts to meet the needs of their individual business units. Monsanto's hub and spoke data warehouse architecture consolidated dozens of data marts into a central Oracle 8.0-based decision support repository containing current and historical transaction data that is populated by ActaWorks on a daily basis. Monsanto expects its Decision Support Repository to grow to more than 50 Gigabytes in the next year.
"We wanted to have an open environment because most sites we support have non-SAP data sources as well as SAP R/3 systems," said Paul Eveld, Monsanto's SAP R/3 information systems manager. "In choosing our solution, we needed something that was available and deployable now as we had SAP R/3 implementations currently underway, and we needed to immediately create our database repository or else our users would be shut off downstream," he said. "We also wanted to go with a solution that would provide us the option of integrating with SAP's decision support solutions."
According to Eveld, Monsanto did a thorough evaluation of ActaWorks, including the performance of the product as well as the quality of the ABAP code it automatically generates to extract data from SAP R/3. "We are pleased with the performance of ActaWorks," Eveld said. "Regarding quality, we have an experienced staff of more than 25 ABAP programmers who have looked at the code generated by ActaWorks and have been very impressed with it," Eveld said.
Added Acta President and CEO Carol Mills Baldwin, "We are pleased to be working with Monsanto, a true leader in their industry and a premier user of SAP R/3. Monsanto represents a key enterprise reference account for Acta as we rapidly grow our business in the Global 2000."
About ActaWorks
ActaWorks is designed specifically to address the challenges of building data warehouses from SAP R/3 and other packaged applications. ActaWorks extracts data from SAP R/3 and other sources, transforms and cleanses the data, and loads it into a data warehouse or data mart. Data mappings and transformations are specified using a graphical user interface without the need to write any code. Information describing the SAP R/3 and other data sources, the target data warehouse schema, and the data mappings and transformation rules are stored in an open relational metadata repository. To extract data from SAP, ActaWorks automatically generates optimized ABAP, SAP's 4GL, obviating the need to develop and maintain customized 4GL code (ABAP) to manage the data warehouse process.
About Acta Technology
Founded in October 1996, and headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Acta Technology is the data warehouse industry's first vendor focused exclusively on providing enterprise data warehouse solutions for packaged client/server applications. Initially focused on SAP and PeopleSoft, 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 ERP systems. Acta is an independent software vendor (ISV) participating in the SAP Complementary Software Program (CSP) and PeopleSoft's Global Alliance Program.
Privately held, Acta is funded by Greylock Limited Partnerships, Norwest Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. Acta customers include Church & Dwight, the Arm & Hammer Company; Maxtor, Monsanto, S-B Power Tools, a division of Bosch GmbH; and Shell Chemical Company. For more information, visit Acta's World Wide Web site at http://www.acta.com.