Being able to consume Odoo in SAP Analytics Cloud

Having failed to find the solution on the internet, I wanted to share with you a case we faced. 

One of our customers recently asked us to be able to report in SAP Analytics Cloud over its two ERPs. The first is an SAP ECC6 ERP that contains its financial data. The other is the Odoo ERP containing its operational data. I do not wish to address the reasons for this situation in this article. We often intervene with clients with decisions inherited from the past. On the other hand, it is up to us to build a user experience around the needs of BI-Planning that is a success. Our goal in this case is that the end user does not notice any difficulty.

Thus, to recover the financial data of the ECC6 ERP this posed no problem to SAP Analytics Cloud and its native connectors. On the other hand, it was more complex to recover the operational data of the 2nd ERP Odoo (mainly logistics). In the end, the customer asked us to have a screen to analyze the availability of his stocks. Having real-time visibility of its stock should allow it to make faster decision-making at the logistics level.

But what is Odoo?

Formerly Tiny ERP (versions 1 to 4) then OpenERP (versions 5 to 7), Odoo (since version 8) is an open-source integrated management software package with many modules. The software package is used by more than two million users to manage their processes around the world.
In our case, the customer has an Odoo On Premise solution installed on a PostgreSQL database.

What is the recommended SAP architecture?

The two important criteria were:
  1. a solution with minimal impact on its current infrastructure (so we preferred the cloud)
  2. data recovery without technical action (we have proposed CPS and SAP Datavisualization tools that connect to it)
We then proposed an SCP-based architecture (SAP Cloud Platform) for the two expected criteria.
  • Reminder: For the record, the SAP Cloud Platform is a SaaS offer from SAP that provides a database and a variety of services. It allows you to build applications adapted to the customer’s business. and able to interact with other SAP software (the SAP HANA database, the ERP, or as in our example the platform of BI – Planning SAP Analytics Cloud)
For visualization, we responded with a UI5 application for decision making and SAP Analytics Cloud for data consolidation of its two ERPs. Note that the UI5 application would allow us to lower the simulations in ERPs via import APIs in Odoo for example. Without this need for retraction we might have done everything with SAC, and without UI5.

How do I connect Odoo to SAP Analytics Cloud?

We were confronted with a problem, without finding an answer on the internet: “How to instantly reassemble information in the SCP platform?”
Indeed, we have not found on the Internet how to connect its PostgreSQL database to SCP simply.
We then turned to a solution that requires DP Agent (Data Provisioning Agent) to connect the PostgreSQL base to the HANA instance hosted in SCP using Smart Data Integration (SDI):
Architecture Odoo - SAP Cloud Platform - SAP Analytics Cloud
This architecture allows our client to access Odoo data in real time from their UI5 app and from SAP Analytics Cloud.
Logo Odoo et SAP Analytics Cloud