Data Warehouse Modernization at Amazonen-Werke
Agricultural Machinery Manufacturer Amazonen-Werke Automates Its Data Warehouse With Wherescape and B.telligent
Where Machine Power Meets Data Intelligence
As a leading manufacturer of agricultural machinery, Amazonen-Werke has always relied on power, precision, and innovation – both in the field and in how it handles data. To meet growing demands for reporting, transparency, and agility, the company partnered with b.telligent to modernize its data warehouse from the ground up. The result: a centralized, automated data platform that unites business units, relieves operational systems, and enables data-driven decisions – today and into the future.
Quick Facts About the Project
Region & Sector: Germany, Agricultural technology
Company size: Large company
Project duration: 3-9 Months
Project type: Implementation
Technology: WhereScape
Initial Situation & Challenge
Amazone H. Dreyer GmbH & Co. KG is a successful North German manufacturer of agricultural machinery. Founded in 1883, it was always a family-run business, and is now in the 4th generation of the Dreyer family. Amazone H. Dreyer specializes in fertilizer spreaders, sowing machines, tillage implements, pesticide/herbicide sprayers, powerful landscaping equipment for gardens and green zones, and snow clearing equipment. The company has since expanded by setting up plants in Leipzig (Germany), France, Russia, and Hungary, not to mention a host of sales outlets in Western/Eastern Europe, Asia, and North America.
Ongoing expansion of the Amazonen-Werke, combined with leadership in innovation in the market, demanded regular adaptation of the IT systems. The challenge for the BI landscape was to keep up with these changes, which was complicated further by the decentralized organization of its IT systems. It was no longer practical to ensure seamless integration of the increasing number of heterogenous sources of data with a conventional DWH approach.
At best, one could have maintained the status quo, whereby cooperation among the departments to advance the reporting systems was out of the question. The Amazonen-Werke worked with a legacy, one-shot, failure-prone DWH system. Moreover, the documentation was obsolete, with no transparency of data flows and logic circuits. Tracing was very difficult. The result: impact analyses of observed changes were almost impossible. Consequently, the departments developed their own isolated applications using MS Access and Excel, thus degrading the DWH to a raw data supplier. Furthermore, some of the isolated applications were put under high load, because they collected data directly from operating sources. In all, managing the diversity of isolated applications led to high data preparation costs due to use of a multitude of independent, centralized, inherently redundant integration logic circuits.
Solution
b.telligent and the Amazonen-Werke jointly set up a completely new data warehouse, by pursuing an automation strategy right from the start that deployed WhereScape RED and 3D. WhereScape is a pioneer and development leader in the field of DWH automation tools. In addition, to ensure seamless expansion of the resulting enterprise data warehouse (EDW), the system design mirrored the principles of a data vault 2.0. In Phase I of the project, Roland Amtmann, the DWH/BI specialist at Amazonen-Werke, and b.telligent’s consultant implemented a control system to automatically generate the staging area and raw vault. Talking about the invaluable benefits of the speed of the WhereScape 3D control system, Amtmann proudly commented, “Today, we can integrate new sources into the raw vault in just a few hours. A few clicks are all we need to generate various kinds of tables and loading processes with WhereScape tools.” For example, this makes it feasible to integrate the systems at a new site acquired during the project – without having to push back the delivery date or use up a significant portion of the budget.
Paired with templates, the WhereScape RED code generator delivered consistently high-quality code as the project progressed. This reduced the effort for both testing and error resolution, with the great benefits of being able to produce current documentation and graphical end-to-end lineage at any time. Both these advantages of automating the DWH will be quite invaluable, primarily in subsequent phases of the project, where the current isolated applications have to be coalesced and integrated into the new EDW.
The enormous degree of simplification and faster development were evident during the Multi-Company Scenario project. The ERP systems at the major Gaste and Hude sites, operated separately in the past, were combined during this project into a central system with the relevant customer logic. With the old system, the necessary modifications would certainly have taken several man-months of effort. Thanks to WhereScape and a clever automation concept, this was fully implemented within a few days into the new EDW. Modeling the DWH as a data vault enabled massive parallelization and simplification of loading processes. Data preparation time dropped significantly, increasing overall data availability. Christoph Kahnt, an advanced user from the financial controls department expressed his satisfaction with this move, stating, “The new DWH structure using WhereScape software delivers more reliable and more useful data for financial controls. Before this, we had to face the complex data preparation task almost alone. But in the future, the DWH will deliver the data in a usable form, which will save us lots of time that we can now apply to deeper analyses.”
Voices From the Project
The new DWH structure makes the data more reliable and easier to use for controlling. In the past, we had to do most of the time-consuming data preparation ourselves; in the future, the DWH will provide us with the data in the form we need. This saves us an enormous amount of time, which we can now use for more in-depth analyses.
Christoph Kahnt
Controlling Department at Amazonen-Werke
b.telligent Services at a Glance
DWH Redesign & Architecture
Rebuilding the data warehouse based on the Data Vault 2.0 model
Automation with WhereScape
Implementation of RED & 3D for faster and standardized development
Rule-Based Data Integration
Automated onboarding of new data sources within just a few hours
ERP Migration & Harmonization
Consolidation of decentralized ERP systems into a central DWH
Code Quality & Documentation
Automated generation of clean code and traceable data lineage
Business-Oriented Implementation
Transparent collaboration between IT and business for sustainable BI solutions
Results & Successes
Fast DWH integration: Automated connection of new source systems in just a few hours with a click.
Modernization of the existing architecture: Scalable Data Vault 2.0 model creates transparency and expandability.
Data utilization for all departments: Centralized, reliable data replaces manual Excel and Access solutions.
The joint team of Amazonen-Werke and b.telligent deployed WhereScape software to create a stable base for data warehousing of the future. This platform helps fulfil the professional requirements of stakeholders in a transparent, easily traceable, and always up-to-date and well-documented technical logic. The EDW can finally meet its expectations by providing the departments with current, reliable, and company-wide uniform data. The departments can now get rid of their isolated applications, and finally focus on their real tasks. The special value of the new EDW throughout the company is clearly evident, not least of all because of recent investment in a high-performance, high-availability infrastructure. Users will no longer have to forego numbers from the central EDW.
The Tech Behind the Success
WhereScape
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