Real-time reporting powered by a new SAP HANA database

In order to increase reaction and implementation speeds in international overhaul business and in material logistics, Lufthansa Technik has migrated its business intelligence system to SAP HANA with the help of Lufthansa Industry Solutions. This unified system platform streamlines reporting processes for this internationally operating company.

The customer

Lufthansa Technik is one of the largest suppliers of MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul) and modifications in the civil aviation industry. This company provides a large range of services worldwide for the complete life cycle of an aircraft: from individual services to entire service packages for aircraft and engines. In 2015, Lufthansa Technik generated EUR 5.1 billion with its seven business divisions: maintenance, overhaul, components, engines, landing gear, VIP aircraft and original equipment innovation. Lufthansa Technik employs a staff of 20,000 worldwide.

The challenge

Competition between MRO providers is growing worldwide. This also has to do with the fact that aircraft, engine and original equipment manufacturers are increasingly providing MRO services themselves. At the same time, new technologies in aviation such as digital on-board computers require new diagnosis and repair processes that create large volumes of data.

Because of these developments, Lufthansa Technik was facing the challenge of modernizing its heterogeneous IT systems in the field of business intelligence in order to react to and implement specialist demands more quickly. In addition to this, the internationally operating company needed to ensure that its reporting took place on a stable platform, as reporting is carried out according to the “follow the sun” principle.

The solution

Lufthansa Industry Solutions migrated one of the two large SAP BI systems at Lufthansa Technik from a classic Oracle database system to an on-premises SAP HANA database in less than six weeks. In the process, it had to take into account comprehensive in-house developments in the system that was going to be migrated.
 
This migration comprised a two-level SAP BI landscape, made up of a development and testing system and a production system. A number of reporting applications have now been integrated into this SAP BI system, including an application for central investment controlling, and one for Lufthansa Technik’s international overhaul business and material logistics.

The details of what Lufthansa Industry Solutions provides:

  • Architecture consulting
  • Project management
  • Test conceptualization and test operations
  • Migration preparation and follow-up
  • Creation of new SAP HANA modeling and development guidelines

The customer benefit

With SAP HANA, Lufthansa Technik now has a high-performance, scalable BI suite that includes state-of-the-art in-memory-computing technology. It has created a basis for generating and reliably providing data and information in real time. In addition to this, SAP HANA covers a diverse range of BI functions when combined with SAP BI, such as the integration of Hadoop architectures and R applications. This new technological basis enables Lufthansa Technik to conduct real-time reporting that goes far beyond classic database publishing approaches.