Truck component maker SAF-Holland produced analyses five times faster with SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Databricks than with traditional reporting approaches, Databricks said in an Oct. 30 blog.
Databricks, which sells data and artificial intelligence software, said the customer example accompanied an expansion of its SAP partnership. Its publication, “Databricks and SAP unleash end-to-end data & AI capabilities to level up enterprise AI transformation,” appeared on Oct. 30.
SAF-Holland uses the platforms to bring together more than 100 million customer, delivery and material records, Databricks said. The manufacturer uses machine learning to predict how reliable customers’ delivery schedules will be, the company said.
Databricks said SAF-Holland can now turn complex SAP data into information for planning and supply chains in minutes rather than weeks. It gave no measurement period, testing method or detailed comparison behind the reported improvement.
The publication announced products and described customer uses rather than presenting a research study. Databricks did not provide a broader dataset or establish whether other customers achieved comparable gains.
The expansion centres on SAP Application Data Foundation, which Databricks said makes SAP application data accessible through customers’ chosen processing system within SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP Databricks is one of those options.
Databricks said access to SAP application data has typically required customers to build and maintain custom systems that extract and copy information. Those systems can lose information about business processes and leave data subject to separate controls, it said.
The company said the new foundation can reduce ownership costs and shorten the time customers need to put their data to use. It supplied no figures for either benefit.
Databricks gave a hypothetical example of a manufacturer using SAP finance and supply-chain software on its own premises while preparing to move to the cloud. The manufacturer could combine years of order history with outside data to build demand forecasts, it said.
That work could retain SAP’s definitions of business data and continue through the move to the cloud without custom extraction systems, Databricks said. The example did not include measured customer results.
The partners introduced SAP Databricks last year, embedding Databricks’ platform within SAP Business Data Cloud, the company said. The expanded partnership plans to bring the full range of Databricks data and enterprise AI capabilities into that service.
Databricks said SAP Databricks and SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Databricks are already available. It did not give a separate release date for the new foundation or the full set of expanded capabilities.
