SAP is the world’s largest enterprise application software company. Its customers generate 87% of the world’s global commerce using SAP’s ERP solutions for all aspects of their operations, from supply chain to human resources. The power of its software lies in its tightly-knit vertical integration. But enterprises are eager to use their SAP data outside the SAP ecosystem, which can be challenging due to its monolithic design and proprietary nature.

Part of the complexity is that SAP implementations and architectures can vary greatly, with underlying systems running on Oracle, Db2i, SQL Server, HANA DB or SAP S/4HANA. Furthermore, SAP systems are highly customizable. Even experienced data professionals struggle with streamlining ingestion and real-time processing of SAP data for insights. 

Fivetran is one of the only data integration solutions that work seamlessly with the SAP ecosystem, enabling companies to overcome these hurdles with an easy-to-use platform and support for a wide variety of data destinations. Let’s look at three leading enterprises that are using Fivetran to unlock their SAP data for real-time insights.

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Cemex cuts SAP processing time from weeks to minutes 

Cemex is a $17 billion building materials enterprise with over 1,800 global facilities. With more than 4,000 tables in SAP, building and maintaining Informatica-based pipelines required a team of consultants and internal employees to maintain. Its batch-based replication could only support a data sync once every hour. It often took weeks to process market data and understand economic issues and supply chain status.

Put simply, Cemex needed a modern data infrastructure with sustainable infrastructure.

The company switched to Fivetran, leveraging its high-volume replication (HVR) capabilities, to consolidate data from all seven of its global SAP ECC and HANA instances. Instead of syncing data hourly, Cemex uses Fivetran to sync data every two minutes, allowing its teams to quickly and easily perform analysis on any global territory. With Fivetran providing near real-time data ingestion, Cemex built a customer 360 view with live integrations into its contact centers and customer-facing mobile app. The app helps Cemex customers to track status of their orders, schedule deliveries and update orders from a mobile device — all powered behind the scenes by Fivetran. More than 93% of its customer base now uses the app to manage their quotes, purchases and deliveries.

Furthermore, with the freshest data, Cemex is able to track carbon emissions across all 1,800 facilities and develop new AI/ML use cases around customer concrete and cement specifications.

“Fivetran has revolutionized our global SAP data delivery, reducing time to insights from days to minutes. We can react swiftly to market changes and track our sustainability efforts at any moment.”
— Gerardo S. Reyna Caamaño, Global Data Architecture Manager at Cemex

Read the full Cemex case study.

Gill Capital’s $50 million gain with real-time insights

Gill Capital, a financial firm based in Singapore, invests in Southeast Asia's top brands, including H&M, The Hershey Company and Alo Yoga. The firm uses SAP for retail inventory management, supply chain data and sales tracking. However, data silos made extraction and reporting difficult, slow, labor-intensive and error-prone.

In 2023, Gill Capital adopted Fivetran and Google Cloud to build a modern data platform. Fivetran quickly integrated data from systems like SAP and Magento into Google BigQuery. They successfully tackled their biggest challenge: extracting data from SAP HANA and decoding it in Google BigQuery. Using change data capture (CDC) with Fivetran, they loaded SAP data into Google Cloud Cortex, creating new data models and real-time reporting. This established a functional data lakehouse and modern data stack.

Post-deployment, Gill Capital gained real-time access to sales data every five minutes and end-to-end visibility of inventory levels across stores, distribution centers and online marketplaces like Shopee and Zalora. During Black Friday 2023, real-time sales dashboards enabled retail employees to respond to customer behavior, resulting in a 32% year-over-year increase in total sales and a doubling of online sales. Gill Capital is saving over 90 hours per week on data engineering and analytics, allowing its team to focus on next-gen data use cases like GenAI. 

“We never had real-time data for Black Friday before Fivetran. Fivetran gave us data from SAP every 5 minutes, which allowed the data team to deploy real-time insights to the store for crowd management, stock replenishment and dynamic last-minute deals.”
— Victor Siow, Chief Data Analytics Officer, Gill Capital Group

Read the full Gill Capital case study.

Pitney Bowes transforms its global logistics with real-time data for 800M+ packages

Pitney Bowes, a global B2B technology enterprise specializing in e-commerce, shipping and mailing, manages over 800 million mail parcels annually across 16 distribution facilities, serving over 750,000 businesses. Its ability to make critical decisions was hindered by siloed data, lack of scalability and inefficient technology infrastructure spending. SAP data limitations caused downstream issues, including package delivery SLAs.

To address these challenges, Pitney Bowes replaced its custom batch scripts and ETL processes with Fivetran. This change reduced batch load times by 95%, cutting data processing from days to under an hour. The business could now collect and aggregate data from 700,000 IoT devices at its facilities, reducing overall processing load. Fivetran HVR allowed them to sync SAP data multiple times a day instead of every 2-3 days.

This flexibility enabled new revenue-generating opportunities, such as a customer 360 portal and predictive analytics. They developed a real-time operational analysis dashboard, providing a single view into volume, labor and efficiency across all facilities. Executives gained deep visibility into operational data, and facility managers could see granular parcel volume data for better labor planning.

With Fivetran, Pitney Bowes overcame SAP’s proprietary data structure limitations, enabling predictive decisions around truck scheduling and launching a Guaranteed Delivery program. This improved customer satisfaction and increased lifetime value (LTV). 

“Before Fivetran, we could only sync data every 2-3 days. Now we sync to Fivetran at least four times a day. SAP was a major factor of investing in Fivetran at the onset.”
— Vishal Shah, Data Architect Manager at Pitney Bowes

Read the full Pitney Bowes case study.

Fivetran drives business success with SAP data

Fivetran’s suite of tools includes specialized connectors and features for license-compliant access and advanced data replication options for HANA cloud-based deployments. This comprehensive support streamlines the integration process from SAP to cloud storage, significantly reducing implementation times and allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than maintaining data pipelines.

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