Investigating a Digital Disruption: SAP HANA

This report investigates the impact of SAP HANA on Wal-Mart's business operations, the challenges and opportunities of implementing SAP HANA, and the concept of digital disruption. It also discusses the benefits of SAP HANA and its capabilities in real-time monitoring of data.

Running head: INVESTIGATING A DIGITAL DISRUPTION
Investigating a Digital Disruption: SAP HANA
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Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................2
1. Business background.......................................................................................................2
2. Digital Disruption Analysis: Impact of SAP HANA.......................................................4
3. Potential Challenges and opportunities of SAP HANA..................................................6
3.1. Migration to SAP HANA: Challenges.....................................................................6
3.2. Opportunities of SAP HANA...................................................................................7
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................8
References............................................................................................................................9

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Introduction
Digital disruption can be termed as a change that generally occurs when a business
integrates new technology in their daily business operations. The integration of technology in
daily business is sure to transform the operation of business model within a company. The new
technologies implemented have a profound effect on the value of the existing products and the
services offered by the company. This is then reason why the term disruption is used, as the
integration of technology with the existing operations of the company disrupts the current market
and causes the need re-evaluation (Mujawar and Kulkarni 2015). Digital disruption marks the
changes in the consumer need and allows the business to fulfill the emerging needs of the
business. The literature review focuses on SAP HANA used by Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart focuses on
speed and innovation with Sap’s HANA technology. The vast corporate infrastructure of the
world’s largest retailer Wal-Mart is streamlined with the help of SAP application. The review
focuses on the business background, analysis of digital disruption in Wal-Mart along with the
challenges and opportunities that is offered by the emerging technologies in future (Cohan 2017).
1. Business background
Wal-Mart is an American multinational retail corporation operating as a chain of
departmental stores. Through innovation, Wal-Mart has been creating thousands of stores in US
that have expanded internationally. Wal-Mart has begun building its supercenters in the year
1988. It offers one stop shopping experiences for the customer by combining a grocery store with
freshly produced bakery and daily products. Most of the supermarkets in Wal-Mart are open for
24 hours, which includes specialty shops such as salons, banks, restaurants and so on. Thus, Wal-
Mart manages a large chain of operations across the world and therefore a proper system was

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essential for integrating all the operations. Use of SAP HANA helps in managing this large chain
of operations in Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart operates world’s most dynamic ecommerce organization,
which is one of the competitive advantages of the organization. It possesses some of the best data
scientist and a large amount of commerce data in the world for delivering a personalized
shopping experience. The huge data gathered helps in understanding the need of the customers.
Every week, Wal-Mart gets traffic of 245 million customers in 11,000 stores and e
commerce website. This results in capturing an immense amount of data everyday about its
business. With the advent of data mining, these collected data could be put to a variety of uses
and had a lot of potential to unlock an innovation throughout the company, which is data driven.
However, the present data warehouse of Wal-Mart had certain limitations such as lack of speed,
flexibility and timeliness. Hence, the company embarked on designing a modern data warehouse
that provides real time data, unlimited granularity and support to the thousands of concurrent
users. Speed of data processing, which was a major concern with the old warehouse, is
eliminated by the new data center. This was achieved by implementing SAP HANA. This
platform handles 200 billion rows of data and has the capability to insert updates at an hourly
rate in to the system at a rate of up to three million rows per minute. SAP HANA became the
leading choice in powering the Wal-Mart’s data café, as the deployment was mainly driven by
the need for speed. The employees of Wal-Mart can respond to the challenges in real time, with
the implementation of SAP HANA.
SAP HANA is designed for replicating and ingesting structured data from different types
of SAP databases and other applications (RameshJadhav 2014). The replicated data is generally
stored into the RAM rather than loading it onto the disk. It is basically an in memory database
and application platform that is capable of performing many operations much faster than it would

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have been possible for traditional or regular databases. It is an in-memory database and platform
of application that allows simplification of design and operation in real time business
applications (Yücesan 2016). This in-memory computing appliance combines the present SAP
database software with a pre turned networking hardware, server and the storage in order to
support real time analytic and transactional processing that is associated with the entire
organization (Weinzierl 2015).
SAP HANA offers Wal-Mart a completely new approach of harnessing the value of all
the corporate data. Its capabilities of data replication and integration speed up the process of
loading data into the database. The in memory storage function of SAP HANA is capable of
accessing data on real time and the end users are able to gain meaningful insight of the
operations and activities taking place within Wal-Mart (Zaslavsky, Perera and Georgakopoulos
2013).
2. Digital Disruption Analysis: Impact of SAP HANA
Wal-Mart has been using SAP technology in order to streamline its daily operations since
the year 2007. The SAP HANA business intelligence platform helps in integrating more than
half a trillion transaction records of the company. Wal-Mart makes use of HANA’s in memory
data processing capabilities in assembling data from the different parts of the enterprise that can
be visualized in real time (Chen and Zhang 2014).
SAP HANA is a flexible in memory data platform that analyzes a large volume of data in
real time. The large amount of data that is obtained from the daily operations of Wal-Mart is put
to use with the help of SAP HANA. Wal-Mart has been successful in using SAP HANA by
putting the data structure with Handoop’s view of data that transforms the overall business. The

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SAP HANA is capable of operating in the moment by using the in memory database and
processing the high-speed transactions and analytics. The in memory technology plays an
important role in exploring and analyzing all the transactional as well as analytical data in real
time from different data sources. The source agnostic data access and integration services allow
accessing and indexing the external data across the organization. This benefits Wal-Mart to a
considerable extent (Färber et al. 2012). This digital disruption in Wal-Mart has rapidly changed
the business operations of the Wal-Mart.
SAP HANA is racing at a breakneck speed towards a digital economy in different sectors
and not just in Wal-Mart. Use of new technology is propelling the evolution and massive digital
transformation that is sure to affect business operations across the globe. SAP HANA defines
digital transformation that refers to the use of new technologies that are incorporated in the
business in order to enhance the customer’s experience along with streamlining the business
operations for creating the new business models (Oswald and Edward 2016).
SAP HANA works on the concept of hyperconnectivity and cloud computing. Cloud
computing enabled with hyperconnectivity is rapidly accelerating the business of Wal-Mart.
Hyperconnectivity is the source of rapid growth of interconnectedness among the different
business operations running in an organization. With this technology, people are able to develop
and maintain more business connection across the globe (Plattner 2014). This digital disruption
in Wal-Mart has resulted in the reducing the cost of streamlining their business operation across
the globe apart from improving their services such as quicker time to market reach, increase in
customers’ satisfaction. Implementation of SAP HANA has given the organization a competitive
advantage in the market helping them in reaching a wider audience and spreading across the
globe in a considerably lesser amount of time. This advanced innovation helps Wal-Mart in

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reimagining and reinventing the process on which their business runs. SAP HANA is a
simplifying the business operations running within an organization by overcoming the IT
complexity and the challenges that a business might face. The business operations make use of
in–memory facilities and capabilities of SAP HANA that addresses today’s digital economy
(Bornhövd et al. 2012).
3. Potential Challenges and opportunities of SAP HANA
The memory-computing tool SAP HANA provides existing SAP users in delivering a
step change in terms of data processing and data analysis. The processing speed of the data is one
of the crucial points of any in-memory computing. SAP HANA is capable of providing optimum
speed for processing a large amount of data. SAP HANA enables its users in accelerating the
routine reporting functions that are associated with the analysis of a large quantity of data. SAP
HANA is continuously improving itself for providing a platform that is capable of running many
enterprise applications; however, this might be a challenge in future for the companies to choose
a proper method of deploying SAP HANA. It is important for the company to decide where will
SAP HANA run (Sikka et al. 2013).
With the regular improvements in SAP HANA, the cost of implementation of the same
also increases. This is a major challenge across the organizations as many organizations may not
be able to make such a large investment. The real time data replication service provided by SAP
HANA has the capability to access and replicate data from the ERP. The high cost of
implementation of SAP HANA is although a challenge, once implemented, the system
considerably reduces the cost of simplifications in hardware and maintenance of the system.
3.1. Migration to SAP HANA: Challenges

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SAP HANA is one of the innovative business platform that is used for leveraging the in
memory technology of the software in order to integrate and streamline the transactions and
analytics within an organization. The challenges faced by the company in migrating to SAP
HANA are discussed below-
1. While migrating to SAP HANA, the budget consideration according to the business
case of the organization proves to be a challenging decision, as it depends on multiple factors
that include sizing, infrastructure, resources and migration strategy.
2. Sizing of HANA appliance is another critical challenge faced by the organization while
implementing SAP HANA as optimized sizing ensures proper performance and expected data
growth.
3. Furthermore, the execution phase of SAP HANA undergoes multiple challenges,
which includes different technical difficulties in implementing this system.
4. The SAP HANA database is very different from the traditional database that prevails
in an organization. Therefore, incompatibility of SAP HANA with the custom code is another
major challenge that is faced by the organization while implementing this system (Lee et al.
2013).
3.2. Opportunities of SAP HANA
The opportunities of SAP HANA are as follows-
1. With the help of SAP HANA, business organization can considerably improve their
operational performances by replacing the traditional database (Lee et al. 2013).

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2. The correct use of SAP HANA can considerably reduce the operational cost by
eliminating the cost of application servers (Färber et al. 2012).
3. The functionality of SAP HANA of providing the real time analytics can be
considerably used to improve the processing power of the system. The flexible analytic model of
SAP HANA has the ability to outperform the current application running within the system.
5. The proper implementation of SAP HANA improves the business productivity with the
help of certain technological tools for reducing the business reliance on the IT department of the
company. Therefore, it can be said, that implementation of SAP HANA can considerably help in
reducing the operational cost of a company (Singh 2015).
Conclusion
Therefore, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that use of SAP HANA in
Wal-Mart has considerably helped in streamlining their large business operations across the
globe. SAP HANA is increasingly adopted in different organization due to its functionality of
real time monitoring of the data that considerably helps in making a proper business decision.
The report discusses the capabilities of SAP HANA and the benefits an organization can gain
while implementing the system. The report further discusses the digital disruption of SAP
HANA in Wal-Mart and the flexibility it provides in increasing the speed of transactional
operations running within the organization. The opportunities and the challenges that might be
faced by a company while implementing SAP HANA is analyzed in this report. SAP HANA is
an innovation in the field of system implementation, which if adopted in a strategic way can help
in reducing the operational and maintenance cost of an organization.

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References
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Cohan, P.S., 2017. Introduction. In Disciplined Growth Strategies (pp. 1-20). Apress, Berkeley,
CA.
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