Development of the SAP Hana Platform Implementation Methodology to Support Big Data Analytics in an Oil and Gas Company

Over time, companies expand their activities and transform their business processes which makes IT architecture more complex, the amount of data becomes larger, and as a result, the old tools and databases are no longer relevant and are not suitable for processing a large amount of information. The solution that allows companies to combine financial and physical data from all subsystems and processes of the company in one place for the reporting is the installation of an ERP system The company X considered in this paper is one of the largest oil production companies in Russia. The company is on the path of digital transformation, faces problems of insufficiently formalized business processes, long execution time for reporting, and wants to increase its competitive advantage in the market. In accordance with this, the management is considering the transition to a new version of the SAP ERP system: S/4HANA, which operates exclusively on the basis of the HANA platform (database). SAP declares that HANA makes the execution of queries really fast and provides opportunities to develop fast complex reports. The paper includes the study of the technical characteristics of the SAP HANA platform, its potential for use for big data analytics, as well as the possibility of building operational reporting using its tools on S/4HANA. As a result of work features of SAP HANA and S/4HANA for reporting were explored, company’s Management Accounting business processes were analyzed and rebuilt, methodology of implementing S/4HANA based on HANA was prepared, Controlling module of SAP S/4HANA system was customized and Functional specifications for the required developments in reporting based on HANA technologies were written. Key words: business process; ERP system; database; SAP HANA; SAP S/4HANA; oil and gas; reporting; BI systems; ABAP; Management Accounting.