Henkel: Driving innovation by migrating critical data and AI workloads to the cloud
Henkel’s scalable data management transformation
Henkel AG & Co. KGaA overcame limited scalability in its database architecture by migrating to SAP HANA Cloud. The flexible data management foundation better serves highly complex database application requirements by combining structured, unstructured, and semantic data in one place and allowing it to adjust database resources and accelerate AI workloads.
| Industries | Region | Company Size |
| Chemicals and consumer products | Düsseldorf, Germany | 47,000 employees |
of data centrally managed on SAP HANA Cloud.
hours to execute the database migration.
of promotions calculated in minutes, not days.
SAP BTP Lead Architect, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA
Recalibrating its innovation engine for scalability and performance
With its brands, innovations, and technologies, Henkel holds leading market positions worldwide in the industrial and consumer business sectors. Its Adhesive Technologies business unit is the global leader in the market for adhesives, sealants, and coatings. With its consumer brands, the company is also a leader in many markets and categories around the world, especially in laundry and home care and hair care. The company’s three strongest brands are Loctite, Persil, and Schwarzkopf.
Guided by its drive to enrich and improve daily life through its products, services, and solutions, Henkel carries a long-standing legacy of innovation, responsibility, and sustainability into the future. It’s this commitment that led Henkel to seize the opportunity to redesign its database in the cloud. With highly complex database application requirements and its database volume growing fast, a lack of scalability and elasticity was a significant concern. Other major priorities for the company’s new database architecture were access to the latest innovations and self-service database tools as well as the potential for lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Enabling elastic scalability to serve current and future innovation
For its database transformation, Henkel made the decision to migrate its legacy SAP HANA database running on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to SAP HANA Cloud. The inherent flexibility, scalability, and security offered by the database were a perfect fit for its large number of applications running on SAP BTP. This included Henkel SPARC—its solution for sales promotions and revenue cloud.
Manjinder Singh, SAP BTP lead architect at Henkel, says scalability and TCO were some of the key factors influencing the shift. He comments, “We chose to upgrade to SAP HANA Cloud because we needed the flexibility to be able to scale our database resources up and down to suit specific application workloads. TCO was another key factor, and we could see that the self-service tools offered by SAP HANA Cloud would provide an opportunity for efficiency and time savings through automation. From an operations point of view, upscaling database resources would be a matter of one or two clicks, not a migration project.”
To perform the migration, Henkel took advantage of the self-service migration service for SAP HANA Cloud to automate key migration tasks and shore up business continuity during the shift. In doing so, Henkel paved the way for the 9 TB migration to proceed without any issues in about 15 hours, including the cloning of Henkel’s source systems and execution of the self-service migration.
Because Henkel carried out the automated migration over a weekend, there was no break in business continuity, allowing its teams to pick up on Monday morning exactly where they had left off on Friday evening.
SAP BTP Lead Architect, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA
Extracting more business value from data assets
Thanks to Henkel’s innovative business applications, there has been substantive growth in its data footprint, with the company operating on a 16 TB data landscape and using automations and features offered by SAP HANA Cloud. The in-memory database integrates a significant volume of information in one location and facilitates fast data exchange. And various query engines give the company’s business and product owners more capabilities for implementing complex logic.
Singh comments, “We’ve seen a significant benefit to our operations in terms of lower cost of ownership and innovative database features. Henkel SPARC is a good example, because there are a huge number of calculations that need to be made for adjusting promotions and determining revenue potential while balancing factory production. Inside SAP HANA Cloud, we are calculating the promotion price using what we call a tree of one billion nodes. And because of the in-memory computing power, it’s very fast. In the past, it took three to four days to calculate a promotion. Now, it can be done during live negotiations in a matter of minutes.”
Since the migration, Henkel has also used the generative AI capability in SAP HANA Cloud vector engine.
SAP BTP Lead Architect, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA
Bringing together semantic, relational, and structured data in real time
Henkel is currently looking to introduce more AI-enabled features and automation to its database operations, including using AI capabilities to analyze performance bottlenecks in the database and trigger proactive alerts.
The company is also planning to adopt automated code-generation tools, particularly for automatically generating SQL queries, to help it significantly reduce its development lifecycle.
In parallel, Henkel is in the early stages of experimenting with and identifying use cases for SAP HANA Cloud knowledge graph engine to enable faster decisions by connecting data with context and semantics.
Want to know more about Henkel?
Enabling Agile Trade Promotion Management with SAP Business AI (SAP Online Customer Story)