Teradata Supply Chain Accelerator Makes SAP Demand Planning Module More Effective, Says Ventana Research

Forecast accuracy improved by speed, frequency and detail.

MIAMISBURG, Ohio — Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC), the global leader in enterprise data warehousing, today announced a positive assessment and marketplace recommendation by Ventana Research for the Teradata Supply Chain Accelerator (TSCA) for SAP.

TSCA increases manufacturers’ return on their investment in SAP by enabling the SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO) system to support high volumes of detailed data and drive more accurate and more frequent demand planning. A demand plan is more accurate when generated as close as possible to the time it is needed and is based on a forecast of fresh, detailed information. Ventana Research advises companies on business intelligence and performance management.

Ventana Research CEO Mark Smith, said, “Users commonly encounter three major pain points in APO. First and foremost is slower database performance when their legacy SAP Business Warehouse database cannot scale to handle the volumes of data APO requires. Second, users employ data aggregation techniques to reduce the amount of data input into APO. Third, integration with large volumes of detailed data from multiple external sources demands that a scalable data staging repository be implemented to reduce the complexity of integration.”

“Integrating SAP and non-SAP enterprise data is critical because more than half of the relevant data for running the business is outside of SAP,” said Keith Henry, Teradata vice president for manufacturing global industry solutions. “Typically, a forecast gets one item wrong for every two it gets right. Increasing accuracy has the potential for an enormous financial impact. Small improvements in forecast accuracy can add millions of dollars to a company’s top and bottom lines.”

TSCA enables the use of detailed business data without impacting performance. Aggregate data is passed up to the SAP APO for forecasting with known proportional factors, and forecasts can be intelligently disaggregated in the Teradata enterprise data warehouse using detailed historical patterns. The Teradata Warehouse, an integrated suite of high-performance data warehousing software and hardware, serves as the high performance database for reporting and analytics across the entire landscape of SAP and non-SAP applications, providing the unified view of the business that is critical to deriving consistent and accurate answers to key business questions.

As assessed by Ventana Research in “Accelerating Supply Chain Performance,” “Teradata’s technology gathers data from multiple systems throughout the organization and integrates it through SAP NetWeaver to enable both more frequent and more accurate planning and to help SAP SCM users gain active business intelligence about their supply chains. No other software vendor provides this.”

Manufacturers using TSCA are able to analyze detailed data one or more times each day from multiple sources of information. Teradata Virtual Access Solution and Teradata Extract and Load Solution facilitate the transfer of information back and forth between an SAP Business Warehouse and an enterprise data warehouse from Teradata. TSCA also supports major business intelligence platforms such as Business Objects and Cognos.

The Ventana Research technology note further recommends, “Companies should look for software that improves enterprise-wide integration of systems, transformation of data and visibility across functions and tiers and for applications that shorten the cycle time of plan creation. Teradata Supply Chain Accelerator for SAP does all this.”