Zeppelin is based in Germany with a turnover of EUR 2.36bn and operate across 35 countries. Today Zeppelin is a huge dealer of Caterpillar construction equipment in Germany and Eastern Europe, but you might remember the name from the famous airships they made in the early 20th century.

The challenge

A number of mergers and acquisitions in the past few years led to the need to combine various data systems under central management. In order to build a data warehouse capable of fast, accurate reporting from a single source of truth, Zeppelin built their own automated data integration tool. However, when they upgraded their ERP system, the Business Intelligence Competency Centre needed more capability. They didn’t want to spend time and money on re-developing their in-house tool, so they contacted WhereScape.

The solution

Zeppelin implemented an automated enterprise data warehouse solution for the whole strategic business unit in Europe, covering many companies and data sources, as a sub-project of a SAP implementation. This centralized their previously disparate data infrastructure. They then looked to automate every process they could.

The results

Now Zeppelin can use both model-driven and data-driven development approaches, and are also future-proofed for any other changes they might need to make to their architecture. They are not bound to any BI approach or way of working, and work with a very high level of automation.