TfL using SAP HANA to process big data from the Internet of Things

CIO Steve Townsend explains how SAP HANA has improved TfL's day-to-day planning

Transport for London (TfL) is using SAP HANA to process large volumes of data - including data from the Internet of Things (IoT) - in order to improve the organisation's day-to-day planning.

In July 2014, TfL CIO Steve Townsend told Computing that the organisation was beginning to use SAP HANA in order to help TfL make "different decisions and outcomes". At that point the in-memory database and analytics platform was only being tested and Townsend was hesitant about rolling it out across the whole of TfL.

Since then, SAP HANA has been fully deployed across the organisation and, according to Townsend, it is yielding benefits.

"So things that used to take a long time, such as the reports and analytics that we used to generate, just generally go faster. It came as a surprise to us because we didn't think we'd see so many requests of data from our ERP, and we went from overnight processing to pressing a button and having [the data] processed the same afternoon," Townsend told Computing.

"So it's driven a layer of asking different questions over a short period of time, which can affect your planning and improve your planning cycles," he added.

Townsend explained that in-memory data management meant that TfL could get a lot more real-time answers to queries, but said that had not enabled TfL to make second-by-second changes yet, but that it was helping with planning what TfL does and how it does it.

"It gives us a number of different options, particularly with our desktop exercises when we are planning for future events. For instance, we can play with data and come up with different answers.

"So, as yet, it is not necessarily changing the day-to-day running of London, but it is certainly changing the day-to-day planning of what we will be doing and the amount of scenarios we can run," he said.

TfL is also using SAP HANA in some of the traffic-management models it is putting together so that it can process huge volumes of that data in a short period of time.

But despite all the benefits that Townsend claims that TfL is gaining from using HANA, he admitted that it "takes a little bit longer to mature - to get some real business value out of it". He also emphasised that it wasn't worth using SAP HANA for everything.

"There are some business processes that just cannot be enhanced by the use of in-memory data management," Townsend said.

"It's like any other technology, you have to look at it and understand it and let it bite you a little bit, but you've got to become very aware of it and then deploy it appropriately - you can't put all of your eggs in one basket," he added.

Townsend said that some of TfL's legacy systems, such as its railway management systems, can't interface with SAP HANA and therefore it would be "highly inappropriate" to suggest there was a path to them from HANA.

"We are definitely [using HANA] where we are utilising the Internet of Things and large data volumes. We are experimenting and 'failing fast', and looking at opportunities at how we can process data and coming up with different models," he said.

Last month, Computing revealed how Townsend believed that the Internet of Things could help TfL to solve congestion problems.

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