Zeppelin automates data warehouse

The entrepreneurial roots of the Zeppelin Group go back to Ferdinand Graf Zeppelin and extend into the early 20th century. Today, the Group employs over 8,000 people at 190 locations in 35 countries and offers solutions for the construction industry and plant engineering.

As part of a larger SAP implementation project, the company planned to deploy a new data warehouse solution. Thanks to experience already gained in the field of automation, Zeppelin was looking for a solution to also automate a far-reaching part of the new data warehouse solution.

Unite many data sources

Stephan Schaumburg-Lippe, IT consultant and application developer at Zeppelin, explains:

"For our strategic business unit Construction Machinery EU, we planned to implement a complete enterprise data warehouse solution that would unite multiple companies and many data sources.

This project was part of an ongoing SAP implementation. Within the scope of this project, several classic data warehouse providers were compared with each other.

Since there was already a very high level of automation in the virtual infrastructure, a targeted search was conducted for vendors that combined data warehouse solutions with a possible automation approach.

This narrowed the field of suitable vendors tremendously, and we ended up inviting eight vendors to an initial round of workshops with our IT team."

Four classic data warehouse vendors participated in the first workshop. Since the Zeppelin team takes an approach that focuses on design rather than programming, they were surprised by the old-fashioned automation approach of the first round vendors.

This led to a second workshop with the remaining four providers. Subsequently, two providers were invited to a three-day final workshop to implement a real-world example.

WhereScape passed all these hurdles with flying colors and was selected at the end of the selection process for its openness and flexibility. These allowed Zeppelin to create the architecture best suited to their needs and to provide it with a very high level of automation.

"With new customers, we often have to start from scratch and convince them of the benefits of automation. Not so at Zeppelin, where large parts of the data warehouse have already been automated for years.

They already knew the benefits of automation from practice, which made it very easy for us. WhereScape fitted directly into the infrastructure and the implementation took place without any obstacles or technical problems".

adds Rob Mellor, Vice President & General Manager EMEA at WhereScape.

Degree of automation

By implementing WhereScape, Zeppelin has been able to achieve a high level of automation. As a result, the company is now even better able to quickly adapt its business to changing conditions. Schaumburg-Lippe explains:

"We want to find out in detail for each process how it runs in the company. What do our colleagues who work with systems need to make their decisions?

Markets, products and organizations are constantly changing. As a success-oriented company, we must be able to respond to these changes as quickly as possible. A high level of automation and thus real-time data processing makes this possible."

Stephan Schaumburg-Lippe explains the advantages of the WhereScape solution:

"Zeppelin is striving for a very high level of automation, pursuing the goal of complete automation of logistics and business processes.

Through WhereScape, we were not tied to a specific way of implementing the data warehouse and could leverage different approaches to virtual infrastructures.

WhereScape allowed us to choose an approach that best suited our environment, our business, and the virtual infrastructure we already had in place.

With WhereScape, we were able to easily achieve our set goal and didn't have to focus on programming."

Zeppelin was looking for a solution focused on data warehouse automation. WhereScape specializes in planning, developing and implementing data infrastructures - including data warehouses - quickly and easily.

To do this, WhereScape uses ELT, auto-generated code, documentation and lineage to migrate data from one platform to another.

This allows data teams to do more with fewer resources by automating repetitive tasks to eliminate human error and ensure employees can respond faster to new requests from the business.