Customer Portrait
Fresenius Medical Care is the world's leading provider of products and services for people with kidney disease, approximately 3.8 million of whom regularly undergo dialysis treatment worldwide. Dialysis is a vital blood purification procedure that takes over the function of the kidney as a substitute in the event of kidney failure.
The company offers products and services along the entire dialysis value chain from a single source. Fresenius Medical Care cares for more than 345,000 dialysis patients in a worldwide network of over 4,171 dialysis clinics. Fresenius Medical Care intends to further consolidate its expertise and use it as a basis for sustainable, profitable growth. The company's ambition is to continuously improve the quality of life and treatment outcomes of patients by offering high-quality products as well as innovative technologies and treatment concepts
The Initial Situation
Fresenius Medical Care uses the SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) for analyses. In order to evaluate data in the SAC, it is obtained from the SAP Business Warehouse (BW) via live connections. In addition, data is made available in the SAC by connecting the Denodo platform via common import connections. The resulting models are processed in stories and analytical applications.
The analyses carried out in the SAC still offered potential for improvement with regard to the user experience when querying larger amounts of data.
The Use Case
Fresenius Medical Care therefore decided to put the biX Connector solution provided by biX Consulting to the test in a proof of concept (PoC). As a result, a decision was to be made as to whether the solution could increase the user experience in the SAC under the given framework conditions.
In the use case, the data from SAP BW had to be enriched with external market data, obtained via the Denodo platform, in the SAC. When considering the use case, the following challenges were taken into account:
- Can data from Denodo and data from SAP BW be evaluated via a uniform interface?
- Can the SAP BW live connection to the SAC also be used for external data?
- Can the solution also use SAP BW authorisation management?
- Does the solution comply with the guidelines for data governance?
- Is the solution also suitable for querying large amounts of data?
The Solution
The use of the biX Connector was successfully validated in the PoC through close cooperation with Fresenius Medical Care's Center of Excellence Business Intelligence and biX Consulting. As a result, the solution has been put into productive operation at Fresenius Medical Care.
The connector offers interfaces to external data, such as web services and all common database systems. Data provision is started directly from the SAC. Desired filter settings can be made by the user. The data sources are queried, data is integrated into SAP BW in real time and is available in SAC in real time.
The advantages of the biX Connector, such as authorisation management, the life cycle of the data or the integration of external information into the business data, are now also available for the data that does not have to be persisted. The solution can also be extended by algorithms, for example for extrapolations of the data. As a result, the biX Connector was able to cope with the challenges posed to it in the best possible way.
The Customer Benefit
Today, Fresenius Medical Care can analyse internal data from BW and external data from the Denodo platform together and simultaneously, as no separate data models have to be integrated into the SAC. By using the Connector, the company thus uses the full flexibility to consume all data sources and immediately derive concrete recommendations for action from them.
The performance of the data analysis in the assumed scenarios has accelerated immediately. While the user had to wait in the range of minutes for the results to be made available without using it, combined data results are now made available within a few seconds.
"Thanks to the biX Consulting solution, we can analyse and visualise live data from non-SAP systems via our business warehouse in a targeted manner. Our management reports thus represent the complete breadth and depth of information. and depth of information."
- Mr. Christopher Gürke, Head of CoE BI -
Fresenius Medical Care
