Customer story
ElectraNet

Mapping Australia’s energy future
The market for electricity is changing and the grid needs to adapt. ElectraNet is evolving to ensure
South Australia’s electricity transmission network provides secure, reliable and stable power. In orderto create cleaner, smarter energy, the business needs to understand its data to make informed,agile decisions. Working with Fujitsu to upgrade its SAP® environment, data tasks that previously
took minutes are down to a few seconds.
About the customer
ElectraNet owns and manages South Australia’s high voltage transmission network. This network, nearly 6,000km in length, transports electricity overlong distances, from traditional and renewable generators, to where it is needed. This energy powers homes, businesses, industry and communities
across metropolitan, rural and remote areas.

Industry: Energy & Utilities

Location: Australia

People: 400+

Web: electranet.com.au

ChallengeElectraNet wanted to upgrade its approach todata warehousing to deliver faster insight tothe business.

Solution• Through SAP’s remote conversion process,Fujitsu supported the migration from theSAP BW 7.4 platform to SAP BW/4HANA

It makes reporting much faster andreduces frustration among users.”
Erin Aslanidis, Business Intelligence Analyst, ElectraNet

Upgrading business intelligence
The energy business is like many other businesses: it is fuelled by data. In order to drive innovation andThe business had used SAP BW 7.4 on a non-HANA database to handle its data warehousing needs.
However, with the underlying hardware reaching end of life, the limitations of the platform werebecoming clear. The dashboard was clunky, overall performance was slow and it provided little
beyond the SAP data.
ElectraNet decided to upgrade to SAP BW/4HANA to modernise the legacy data warehouseenvironment and provide a foundation for next generation business analytics. To do so,ElectraNet needed the right technology partner.
“The old system had been in place for over ten years and created lots of pain points,” explains Erin
Aslanidis, Business Intelligence Analyst, ElectraNet. “Creating a pathway to SAP BW/4HANA was obvious.
“We asked SAP for recommendations which suggested Fujitsu. Fujitsu’s local presence, technicalexpertise and SAP experience made it a good partner to deliver this important project.”10x
reduction in the data footprint,
from 545GB to 54GB

Introducing remote conversion
Fujitsu employed the new remote conversion process, only available as part of SAP’s Early Adopter
Care programme, to migrate the old platform to the new. This created parallel environments andmigrated only the requisite data models, reports and associated objects, enabling ElectraNet toeliminate years of obsolete objects.
The process allowed parallel loading of the existing BW 7.4 environment and the new BW/4HANAenvironment. In turn, this supported a ‘soft’ go live, allowing ElectraNet to run both environments
in tandem and perform reconciliation between the new environment and existing production

with Fujitsu and SAP, we spent six months on the conversion process and then migrated to the newenvironment over one weekend,” continues Aslanidis. “The conversion tools enabled us to extract all
the necessary data and table structures, and then automatically populate the new platform.”

Faster performance, smaller data footprint
minutes are down to a few seconds; query requests are now 73% faster. This responsiveness madeusers more productive and helped to attract more users to the system. Beforehand, many staff chose
The new environment has dramatically reduced the data footprint, from 545GB to 54GB due to datacompression of columnar table storage. At the same time, there has been a reduction in batch load
times from over six hours to under two, even without employing HANA optimisations.
frustration among users.
“Fujitsu’s support and technical SAP knowledge was critical in making this project a success andhelping to upskill me and my team so we can manage the new BW/4HANA platform.”

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