When two industrial giants join forces, streamlining business processes is a truly mammoth task. A prime example of this was the merger of Bayer AG with the US company Monsanto. Reporting and Analytics Experts of Xient GmbH supported the mammoth wedding on several levels and ensured that everything ran smoothly.

The systems and processes of the two industry giants, some of which had grown over decades, had to be harmonized and modernized in the course of the merger. We were faced with the challenge of transferring the systems of the seed specialist Monsanto to those of Bayer. After the migration, however, the data situation not only had to be uniform. A modern and high-performance target architecture was also part of the task, with which our Xient Architects employed.

SAP HANA data lake replaces outdated SAP queries

Monsanto relied on SAP queries, which were no longer up to date, for its approximately 200 relevant Infosets. After a detailed analysis of the data situation and consultation with the decision-makers at Bayer and Monsanto, we decided on an SAP HANA Data Lake database as the target architecture. This will be hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud. Our extensive expertise with lake architectures and extensive experience working with large corporations - especially in the pharmaceutical and logistics segments - were the driving forces behind the successful implementation of the data merger between the global corporations.

Our developers carried out a systematic analysis of Monsanto's historically grown and thus correspondingly complex SAP queries. This included deconstructing the sometimes opaque query logics through reverse engineering and classifying the results according to importance and complexity. The Xient developers then converted the old Monsanto Infosets into Calculation Views based on SAP HANA.

Smooth operation despite complex challenges

The integration of Monsanto data into the Bayer environment was, of course, a highly interesting task, and not only because of the demanding data starting point. Our range of services included complete support for the merger. In addition to the extensive testing and subsequent go-live of the developed SAP solutions, this also included training and support for the employees. With global corporations like Bayer and Monsanto, there are also demanding logistics involved. All sub-processes had to be coordinated across three time zones, as employees in Europe, the USA and India were involved.

Despite all the perceived difficulties, our Xient team was able to complete the data migration between Monsanto and Bayer quickly and with maximum efficiency. All data reconciliations between the old and new systems ran successfully and error-free according to our tests.

The performance gain of the new architecture should not be underestimated: Where queries based on the old Monsanto Infosets sometimes had response times of up to 15 minutes, the modern SAP HANA in-memory database delivers the results as calculation views practically in real time. The selected in-memory hosting in the AWS cloud ensures an enormous increase in performance and thus also in productivity - a gain at all levels, which one would expect from a corporate group in this dimension.