PwC Germany enables real-time, automated reporting across vast quantities of SAP and non-SAP data

Large companies everywhere are eager to unlock real-time insight across finance, HR, marketing and more. But they’ve struggled to achieve this goal, due to the difficulty of combining data from SAP and non-SAP systems on a large scale in real time. PwC Germany was eager to crack this conundrum.

The firm had already implemented SAP Cloud ERP Public as part of a broader deployment involving multiple PwC territories. However, reporting remained a challenge. Extracting data was slow, with long data loading times reducing the ERP performance. Data hierarchies were lost in the extraction process, creating extra manual work. On top of this, there was no central data platform to combine data from SAP and other systems.

PwC Germany set out to address these pain points and enable real-time reporting across SAP and non-SAP data on a massive scale. The stakes were high, as any potential solution would benefit its own business, its clients and the broader PwC network.

PwC Germany gathered data required for financial and HR reporting in a large SAP Datasphere repository. It took a step-by-step approach to connect source systems – including SAP Cloud ERP Public, SAP Human Capital Management (HCM), plus non-SAP systems such as Salesforce and TalentLink – to SAP Datasphere.

In parallel, the team built a harmonised data model that supports financial reporting, planning and simulation. Both the scalable SAP Datasphere solution and the standardised data model can be used by other PwC territories as they implement SAP Cloud ERP Public.

Now, data is loaded from source systems into SAP Datasphere in a fast, automated way, with minimal impact on ERP performance. In conjunction, PwC Germany deployed SAP Analytics Cloud, which provides powerful data analysis and visualisations.

PwC Germany has successfully improved its financial reporting outcomes. Automating the process has saved thousands of hours of manual work, with reports delivered on time even if key individuals are on holiday. In addition, reports are now based on real-time data, which was never previously possible.

Now, 20,000 users across the firm received standard reports and dashboards, and they can generate additional reports on a self-service basis. Since the central data platform built on SAP Datasphere provides rich data from many sources, employees can run entirely new types of reports and unlock fresh insights. In the meantime, PwC Germany is extending the SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud implementation to support additional types of reporting in areas such as HR and marketing.

In the past, PwC Germany relied on separate solutions for reporting, planning and simulation. Using SAP Analytics Cloud to support all these use cases has enabled the company to retire old solutions, saving money and reducing complexity. There’s no compromise on functionality either, since planning and simulation scenarios can be saved, shared and compared.

Before this innovative work, previous implementations of SAP Datasphere had been confined to small proof-of-concept exercises. PwC Germany pioneered a large-scale deployment. The team worked closely with SAP as the two companies transformed their data environments, collaborating to overcome challenges. Together, they have created the world’s largest instances of SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud – the largest at SAP itself, and the second largest at PwC Germany.

This work helps prepare for implementing large scale SAP Datasphere environments as part of SAP Business Data Cloud, which PwC Germany is now supporting SAP to develop. More broadly, it creates an entirely new blueprint for managing and analysing enterprise data, to help unlock data-driven decision-making at scale across the world’s largest companies.