What if SAP and engineering data gave you one live picture of the asset?
August 2026
A leading Nordic engineering and construction group, delivering subsea and offshore projects worldwide, was running operations on data that was already a day old. SAP, engineering platforms and construction tooling each held their own version of the truth, reconciled nightly by exports that sometimes failed silently.
S5 built a cloud-native data backbone on Azure that streams SAP and engineering data into one governed model, refreshed in near real time, giving the business a live digital-twin view of assets and work. The S/4HANA core stays clean. The platform quietly heals itself when pipelines fail.
The need
Three disconnected worlds. SAP S/4HANA held the transactional truth for finance, materials and work orders. Engineering platforms held the truth for assets, tags and design. Construction tooling held its own view of what was being built and where. Nothing joined them except overnight exports and spreadsheets, which meant operations, supply chain and finance opened each morning with their own numbers, and spent the first hour arguing about which was right.
When a pipeline failed overnight, nobody knew until a user complained mid-morning. The business needed a live, governed picture of the asset and the work, refreshed within the shift, not the next day. And it needed to happen without touching the SAP core, because an S/4HANA upgrade window was already on the horizon.
Our solution
S5 ran a focused ten-week digital-twin data sprint, senior-only, delivered end to end.
An SAP-to-Azure reference architecture with landing, raw and curated zones, designed for governance from day one, not bolted on later. Incremental Azure Data Factory pipelines moving SAP CDS-view data into Azure SQL in short, frequent batches, without touching the S/4HANA core. Engineering platform feeds landing in the same governed model, so design and asset data sits next to SAP work orders and materials, not in a parallel universe.
Log Analytics dashboards, alert rules and PowerShell runbooks that restart failed jobs automatically, so pipelines self-heal before users notice. Star-schema models in Azure SQL and Power BI KPI packs for cost, schedule and asset health, in the hands of the business.
The tech stack is a choice. The outcome is what matters: one live picture of the asset, in the hands of the people who run it, with the SAP core kept clean and the platform quietly looking after itself. Learn more about our approach in SAP integration and analytics strategy.
Technologies:
Results
- One governed picture of the asset. Engineering, operations, supply chain and finance share the same live view, not four versions of yesterday.
- Data latency cut from overnight to a fraction of an hour. Issues surface during the shift, not the next morning.
- Zero blind-spot failures. Log-based alerts and runbooks recover pipelines before users notice, no more surprise gaps in reporting.
- An AI-ready clean core. CDS-based extraction keeps S/4HANA upgrade-safe and feeds future predictive maintenance and AI, without another data project.
