The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and you must emphasize using the right technologies to deliver better.
As they say, data is new power, and you must have the right tools and technologies to have real-time data to make informed decisions. A mere availability of data is not enough; you must have a comprehensive strategy to gather, process, and analyze data to get the most out of it.
Most enterprises store data in SAP, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. This data might be operational data, such as SAP ECC OR SAP S/4HANA, data stored in SAP's data warehouse suite of products, such as SAP BW or SAP Datasphere, or data from SAP's SaaS solutions. Businesses must comprehensively view this data and combine it with data from other sources to make informed decisions.
By combining data stored in SAP with Microsoft Fabric, businesses can better manage and utilize their data to improve efficiency, productivity, transparency, and data-driven decision-making in the system. Furthermore, Microsoft Fabric's flexibility helps businesses streamline processes, explore new possibilities, and unlock powerful insights.
We will discuss how to integrate SAP data into Microsoft Fabric, including its benefits, challenges, and steps involved in the process.
Reasons to Integrate Microsoft Fabric and SAP
There are various reasons for integrating Microsoft Fabric with SAP. Below are some of them to explain why this integration is crucial for better business management.
Breaking Down Silos
One of the most disheartening factors that does not allow businesses to make informed decisions is data silos. Your SAP system has highly valuable sales, marketing, customer, finance, and inventory. However, if it is stored there, it is useless to you. By integrating Microsoft Fabric with SAP, you can unlock its hidden potential to give a paradigm shift to your operations.
Unified Data Ecosystem
By integrating SAP data into Microsoft Fabric, businesses can create a unified data ecosystem where smooth information exchange is possible across various apps and services. This helps multiple teams and other stakeholders collaborate more efficiently for better outcomes.
Enhanced Analytics
Businesses can go beyond simple data by exploring its hidden meaning by leveraging Microsoft's powerful data analytics tools, such as Power BI. They can gain more profound and actionable insights into data to make informed decisions.
360 Degree Customer View
With this integration, businesses can combine SAP sales records with Microsoft CRM data to have a 360-degree, holistic customer view to understand their expectations, behaviors, interests, purchasing history, etc. Businesses can use such crucial insights to strengthen their sales and marketing campaigns.
Scalability and Flexibility
Irrespective of the volume of data you receive from various sources, Fabric's cloud-native architecture promises high scalability. Businesses can handle growing data volumes while seamlessly adapting to changing business needs.
Cost Efficiency
By integrating SAP data with Microsoft Fabric, businesses don't have to maintain separate integration infrastructures, significantly reducing operational costs.
What Are the Challenges in Integrating SAP with Microsoft Fabric?
You must have found the benefits highly compelling. However, you must remember some integration challenges to ensure a seamless integration process.
SAP Systems are Complex Ones
SAP systems are mostly highly customized and complex according to business needs. Businesses must plan carefully to extract and integrate data without any data losses. You might need to hire professionals for the job.
Data Mapping and Transformation
Businesses might find it challenging to align data formats and semantics between SAP and Microsoft Fabric. To achieve this, they might need robust data mapping and transformation processes.
Security and Compliance
Adhering to various data security regulations, such as GDPR and HIPPA, throughout the integration process is also challenging. As ERP data stored in the SAP system is highly sensitive, businesses must comply with all security regulations.
An Inclusive Step-By-Step Guide to Integrate SAP and Microsoft Fabric
There are two ways you can integrate SAP with Microsoft Fabric:
- First, you can use in-built SAP connectors supported via the On-Premises Data Gateway (OPDG).
- The second way is to use Azure Data Factory or Azure Synapse Analytics to land data into your Fabric Lakehouse.
We will understand both these methods in detail.
Before that, let's check out some prerequisites to make it happen.
- You will need access to an SAP system, such as SAP BW, SAP S/4HANA, etc.
- Microsoft Fabric Subscription
- Various permissions to configure different connections and access data
- Azure Data Factory subscription
Before exploring the integration part, let's understand what SAP BW and SAP S/4HANA are.
It is a model-driven data warehousing product that collects, transforms, and stores data generated in SAP and non-SAP apps. It also makes this data accessible to stakeholders through built-in reporting, BI, and analytics tools.
On the other hand, SAP S/4HANA is an Enterprise Resource Planning suite that allows businesses to perform various transactions and analyze business data in real-time. It also allows businesses to modify their existing business processes and models and create new ones.
Integration Method 1: Through SAP Connector
Let's delve deeper into this method step-by-step.
Use SAP HANA DB to extract data from BW and send it to Fabric.
- First, open the Data Factory and choose Workspaces. Select New > Dataflow Gen2 (Preview) from your Data Factory workspace to create a new dataflow.
- Now, search for the SAP HANA database on the Choose data source page.
- To create an SAP HANA connection, add all the required details and your credentials on the screen.
- The properties of the relevant BW object will appear on the left side. Now, select the desired objects.
- Select the desired target recorded in delta parquet format. The table in this format can now be used as a source for tools such as Power BI.
Use SAP BW Application Server to Extract Data from BW to Fabric
You can use BW Connection to connect to the BW server using Power Query. With this, you can access BW objects, queries, and views.
Though it looks easy to access BW objects, it might not be as good in performance. Also, users must select fields one by one while transferring to Fabric.
In some cases, they might not work without making some adjustments.
- First, open the Data Factory and choose Workspaces. Select New > Dataflow Gen2 (Preview) from your Data Factory workspace to create a new dataflow.
- Now, search for the SAP BW Application Server on the Choose data source page.
- To access your BW server, add relevant details on the screen. The specific details you need to enter depend on your BW server configuration. Then, click on NEXT to continue.
- You will be redirected to a page where you can see all the BW objects that are available to you.
- Click on the data set you want to access.
- After selecting the data set, click on the checkboxes next to the field names to select the fields you want to extract.
- Click Next.
Integration Method 2: Extract Data from BW to Fabric with Azure Data Factory using Data Pipeline
- From the toolbar, select Workspaces and select the workspace where you want to create your pipeline. Then click on New > Data Pipeline.
- You will be redirected to the page where you can create your pipeline. Click on Copy Data to start building your pipeline.
- For the Copy Activity, you must first define the source. You can choose the proper connection to connect to the source. Click on Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2.
- To establish the data source connection, you must access the URL and Account Key of the Azure Blob Storage Container you want to connect to.
- You can follow the following steps discussed below for that.
- First, sign-in to Azure Portal by visiting https://portal.azure.com
- On the left-side menu, find the Storage Accounts.
- Now, once you can access all storage accounts, find one you want to connect to and click on it.
- Go to Settings > Endpoints and copy the Data Lake Storage link under the Data Lake Storage section.
- In the Access keys section, you will find two keys, named key1 and key2. You can use these keys to access your account.
- Now, you need to choose the Parquet file for the source.
- Select the location where you want to upload the data. For example, you can choose Lakehouse.
- Create a new Lakehouse with a unique name and save your data there.
- In the Copy activity, you have the connections to be used. Now, you can select the Source and Destination connections created within the Copy activity.
- Run the pipeline, and your data will be copied into the Lakehouse.
- You can have the output ready in the Lakehouse you created.
Conclusion
Integrating SAP into Microsoft Fabric is crucial to improving efficiency and bringing better data visualization within the organization. Fabric's flexibility and versatility, combined with SAP's BW data warehousing and HANA computing technologies, help businesses gain valuable, actionable data insights to make informed, customer-centric decisions.
By seamlessly integrating SAP BW and HANA into Fabric, organizations can leverage real-time analytics capabilities with Fabric's cloud-based infrastructure to bring scalability, data visualization, and transparency to the system.
With data centralization in place, along with streamlined data processing workflows, businesses can drive innovation and design customer-centric programs.
Ready to transform your data strategy with SAP and Microsoft Fabric integration?
Contact DynaTech Systems today to get started!
