An article on SAP Community Network describing the solution on SAP HANA, NW 7.4 on HANA, SAP Landscape Transformation, SAP Data Services and IBM WebSphere MQ, which I have put together for Cambridge Assessment. An article written by Mark Taylor, Cambridge Assessment, project manager on the SAP HANA project.

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Results Determination, powered by SAP HANA
Introduction
During its SAP implementation, Cambridge Assessment faced the challenge of how to
implement a new solution to determine candidate examination results.
Following analysis and proof of concept work, a joint Cambridge Assessment and
Cognizant Technology Solutions project team is delivering a Native SAP HANA
solution, which will represent a significant business change to examinations
processing.
Following a proof of concept in 2014 and a full design and build, the solution is
currently in the testing phase before rollout in September 2015.
Background – What we do
Cambridge Assessment (part of the University of Cambridge) is a not for profit
organisation that creates and administers examinations for learners and assessment
organisations across the globe.
Viewed at a distance, the examination process can be broken down into the following
steps:

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Results Determination - Current Challenges
Results Determination (The process of turning marks into results) involves a number
of challenges:
High volume and throughput:
- 10,000,000 candidate exams taken each year
- 800,000,000 marks received each year
- Peak processing of 7,000,000 marks/hour, 2,000 marks/second
- Results Determination processes which run over period of days
· Legacy systems have product structures held in code which limits the business
ability to be able to create new products which would ‘break’ the code quickly
· Complex Business Rules – Calculation of each candidate's results involve the
combination of approximately 60 raw marks and the calculation of 20 new marks
through a series of mathematical formulae.
The Way forward for Results Determination
When Cambridge Assessment decided to implement SAP, replacing its legacy
systems, this raised the question of how Results Determination could be achieved in a
new technology that would tackle the challenges experienced previously.
Following analysis and proof of concept work, the project team started to consider
SAP HANA as an alternative to the initial SAP SLcM implementation. The attraction
to HANA was clear:
HANA database allows Cambridge Assessment product rules to be defined in
data, as product data recipes.
Conceptually, by processing data ‘in memory’ HANA could reduce the amount of
time spent in costly Results Determination read and write processes
HANA hardware is configured to support parallel processing, which supports the

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high-volume of candidate processing against product rules.
The columnar data store offers further improvements in the performance of read
processes.
Cambridge Assessment engaged in a three-stage Proof of Concept to prove the data-
definition concept, volume processing and data transfer in and out of HANA, after
which the decision was taken to move forward with SAP HANA.
Solution Architecture
The Results Determination Solution has the following features:
Results Determination process will be executed within native SAP HANA with
raw marks flowing in from a variety of third-party marking systems and
additional reference data (for e.g. candidates, centres, booking etc.) fed real-time
from SAP Business Suite, third-party databases & excel files upload via user
interfaces.
The end to end process consists of steps such as validation & reconciliation of
raw marks followed by execution core calculation algorithms on vast amounts of
marks for numerous candidates.
The results further pass through a serious of post-calculation check points before
being packaged and sent back to SAP Business Suite from where the results are
published to the candidates.
The technologies involved in the solution are illustrated below:

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The HANA box is built on a single-node IBM X6 processor with SUSE Linux OS
and 512GB memory.
The box itself is a stand-alone NetWeaver 7.4 on HANA but with no standard
package installed. Most of the building blocks are within Native HANA making
use of features such as Information Views, stored procedures, column stores etc.
with the NetWeaver layer on top primarily used for BRFplus decision tables,
user interfaces and job orchestration.
All of the real-time data intensive operational reporting is built using various
reporting tools available within the SAP Business Objects 4.1 suite. The reports
and other interactive user interfaces are further combined within a single view
on SAP Enterprise Portal.
The application depends on external data being passed into it at real-time using
SAP LT Replication technology from SAP Business Suite and SAP Data Services
4.2 for data from other third-party databases.
Large volumes of granular raw marks are streamed into the application from a
variety of marking sources through the SAP Process Integration middle-ware
with volume data buffered in the interim. Examination results once processed &
calculated are sent back using SAP Data Services to SAP Business Suite for

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completion of the business process and to SAP BW & third-party systems to
facilitate offline statistical reporting & analytics and long-term storage.
Although built on a stand-alone system for now, the use of right and advanced
systems positions us to easily integrate & scale the application with packaged
solutions in future such as SAP Suite on HANA or BW on HANA if need be.
Interim Project Outcome
As previously stated, the solution is currently in the testing phase, so the business
benefits of the project deliverables are unproven. Still the interim project outcomes
are as follows:
Complex business rules have been defined and stored as data defined recipes in
HANA.
Compared to previous solutions which involved significant effort to hardcode
product structures, HANA with the NetWeaver 7.4 front end delivers a User
Interface with the capability to load new product structures.
Processing throughput has improved by several thousand times and
performance on hardware scaled for the initial implementation already exceeds
the full performance requirement for Cambridge Assessment.
Existing solution Target Performance Current Test Results
using HANA
· Initial SLCM
Implementation: <1
Marks/Sec
· Current phase target:
300 Marks/Sec
· Final state: 2000
Marks/Sec
· Current PSV rate: 8000
Marks/Sec
· Key process speed is
business enabler