While going through the HANA content I stumbled upon a topic called “ Spatial Analysis using SAP HANA platform”. Some 13 years back that I have extensively worked on Spatial analysis using ESRI ArcGIS 9.x for Environmental Management for my doctoral thesis. Now with that background and with current knowledge on HANA I would like to give a brief overview of the functionalities and how merging of GIS with HANA would be of huge interest for managing EHS in a enterprise context.
The SAP HANA Spatial is an optional component of SAP HANA, it can be primarily used to analyze the Sales data - that is it stores geospatial data along with business data in the same instance of HANA. There are diverse analysis options available like calculation of distances, intersections, buffer etc. The different functions include Reverse Geo Coding functionally using Smart Data Quality and SVG file outputs based on union, full text search, buffering, clustering. The capabilities of Spatial Predicates primarily help in getting answers to various questions with yes / no context based on capabilities like intersect or overlap features. Some of the SAP EHSM modules where these spatial analysis will help or can be extended include
- Supply Chain management to meet operational compliance of various regulatory requirements is another area of huge benefit. In a real time scenario how a material movement is managed to meet the Tonnage bands by not exceeding the thresholds by analyzing the proximity analysis and identification of material movement for volume based regulations like REACh, SVT.
- Optimizing routes for the efficient delivery of goods and services is another area which in combination of HANA and GIS capabilities will offer good benefit as the most cost efficient path and how different modes of transport are managed effectively to meet various DG requirements
- Incident accident information analysis of incidents data and their prevalent occurrence and other causes if it occurring on a remote platforms and noting down the information is another useful feature of Spatial analysis
- Integration of Sensor Data for measurement of water, wastewater quality for meeting environmental management requirements. Usually sensor data is real time and representation of the same with status will help companies in identifying the permit issues
The full functionalities of GIS is vast like using Overlays, buffers and other network and routing functionalities and if such capabilities are moved to HANA with an option of intelligence it will change the way business operates on a day today basis. I expect it is only the beginning and in coming days we would be seeing for merging of Advanced GIS capabilities with SAP functionalities which will give a highly interactive real time decision making abilities with advanced algorithms. Such algorithms help businesses like e-Commerce, utilities, transportation and other companies, though the aspects of security and data volumes needed to be checked as well.
Open SAP has listed this topic as one of the training items which can be enrolled free of cost to get familiarity of the functionality to carryout various analysis. Besides these open SAP source there are couple of interesting SAP blogs available on this topic like i. On Spatial Analysis with HANA & ii Guide on Spatial analysis.
Thanks and Regards
Jayakumar
