SAP is linking its powerful HANA platform to geospatial services from Esri to enable companies to make better decisions about locations for physical assets, like locating gas pipelines away from residential buildings.

“We have built a custom application on SAP HANA that helps us identify high-risk gas pipes in close proximity to residential buildings. In the past, this analysis took three and a half hours using our legacy database,” said Pieter Den Hamer, Big Data BI Strategy Manager, Alliander. “Now with spatial processing in SAP HANA, we can answer the same question in two to three seconds, allowing us to perform ad hoc asset management, reduce potential outages and avoid catastrophic failures. We can literally say we are saving lives with SAP HANA.”

“By working with SAP Consulting we were able to integrate financial, real estate and contract data from SAP applications with GIS data from our Esri ArcGIS system,” said Erik van Os, Project Planning and Control, Land Management, Province of Noord Brabant in the Netherlands. “By geographically-enabling our business data using the GEO.e service from SAP, we have improved the efficiency of our business processes and reduced integration costs.”

With the GEO.e framework delivered by SAP Consulting, spatial data is embedded into business processes, helping to enable users to visualize business data about land parcels, buildings, assets or work orders on maps from within an SAP application. Geo-enabled business applications include the SAP Enterprise Asset Management solution, the SAP Linear Asset Management application, the SAP Real Estate Management application and the SAP Customer Relationship Management application, which help organizations in industries such as utilities, oil and gas, mining, transportation, public sector and agriculture to become more efficient.

The features announced at the Esri conference in San Diego also include real-time mobile solutions which could help emergency response or military users.