Hunkemöller implemented SAP in 1996, which makes them a long-time SAP user. They use SAP IS-Retail and SAP BW. Because their business is retail, this means that their transactional data grows quickly over time. Their material master grows every season, and they are also expanding into new markets. All this resulted in Hunkemöller having a large and fast-growing database.

To keep their SAP systems up to standard, Hunkemöller migrated to HANA, which gave them faster insight in analytics and shop replenishments. It also compressed their systems, but the IS-Retail system was still 2.4TB. The estimated yearly data growth was estimated to be 18%.

Hunkemöller has a Production, Quality and Development landscape strategy. The Quality Assurance system was always an exact copy of Production, thus also 2.4Tb, and a Client Copy took two weeks. This meant that copies were not done regularly.

The landscape is also hosted externally on a virtual platform, and costs are calculated on storage use. The large Quality Assurance system meant that they had to pay more on storage.

Hunkemöller wanted to reduce the landscape footprint to save costs on HANA and storage. The costs of HANA were 10 to 15% higher than their current systems. The Quality Assurance system needed to have enough data for testing and have consistent transactional data.

Hunkemöller worked with EPI-USE Labs to work out a solution that would dramatically reduce the Quality Assurance database size. The initial business case was calculated on a 70% footprint reduction with a three months’ time-slice. A three months’ time-slice of consistent data would provide enough transactional history for accurate testing, and result in significant cost savings.

Data Sync Manager was implemented within two weeks, and was used to copy the necessary data to create a new system that contained only 290GB. During the implementation, the Hunkemöller team was trained to be able to do refreshes by themselves, and thus do it whenever they need to.

After implementation, Hunkemöller found a six months’ time-slice delivered twice the amount of test data, and as an added benefit, it still only used 320GB of space. Hunkemöller expects to receive their Return on Investment (ROI) in less than 10 months, which is even better than the original 13- month calculation.

Benefits to Hunkemöller

The benefits of the project were twofold.

Expected benefits were that the business case was met; there was a tangible cost reduction on storage, which meant reduced cost on HANA and also saving on storage as they paying per usage. They also had a reduction in copy times to create a refresh for QA.

The second benefit was Hunkemöller is now able to do refreshes quickly, and that they have more up-to-date QA data for accurate testing. This was highlighted further in that business users are now asking for more frequent refreshes. Since they have acquired a Data Sync Manager licence, and they are trained to use it, this is not a problem, and neither are any further refreshes. They are empowered to create the data they need to run their business successfully.