With its own billing platform, evu zählwerk Abrechnungs- und Servicegesellschaft mbH – a settlement and service company - offers its customers from the energy industry a high-performance tool that fulfills legal requirements and supports existing business processes. Furthermore, the portfolio of the settlement specialist includes services that range from the reading of meters, through invoicing, to professional receivables management and reporting.
Initial Situation
In the company’s reporting division, evu zählwerk uses SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse 7.0 provided by rku.it. However, the amount of data that was being processed from SAP for Utilities was increasing so steeply at a rate of 62 percent per year, that the consequences had a great impact: high costs for memory usage, response times of evaluations that were no longer efficient, longer load times for data transfer from source system to SAP BW, long save and backup times.
rku.it implemented a solution that was based on additional software alongside standard SAP archiving. The results speak for themselves: a considerably reduced amount of data in the BW system, shorter response and load times, as well as the possibility to still access archived data.
Solution
Evu zählwerk relied on the Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) for their data archiving. An ILM strategy has the objective of providing information according to its value and use on the least expensive storage medium possible, making it accessible, and storing it on a long term basis.
evu zählwerk’s requirement to be able to access archived data for current analyses could not, however, be fulfilled using standard functionality. For this reason, the PBS nearline storage solution (PBS CBW NLS) was implemented.
The PBS Nearline Storage solution (PBS CBW NLS) that was implemented enables integrated query access to the BW database and archive data, whereby the data for this is transferred to an external disk system via standard SAP archiving.