Application Services

Upgrading SAP Business Objects for a Leading Energy Producer

A modern analytics platform that prioritized business continuity

#SAP
#analytics
#energy
#BusinessIntelligence
#Migration
#Modernization

Challenge

The Ticking Clock of Technical Obsolescence

One of California’s largest oil and gas producers faced a critical juncture: their existing SAP Business Objects implementation had reached the end of its Mainstream Maintenance and Priority One Support lifecycle.
The client faced several daunting hurdles:

Obsolete Tooling: Thousands of legacy reports were built using “Desktop Intelligence,” a tool no longer supported in newer releases, requiring a massive conversion to “Web Intelligence.”
Architectural Complexity: The system handled millions of records from disparate sources, requiring a solution that could manage high-volume data without performance degradation.
Security Gaps: Complicated authentication requirements, including a lack of integrated Single Sign-On (SSO) across their SAP BW and BI platforms.
Lack of Mobility: Executives lacked the ability to access critical production and financial data via mobile devices.

Impact

Customer's targets to meet their business goals

Report Maintenance: 40% Reduction in support tickets by cleaning/standardizing universes.

Regulatory Compliance: Faster Reporting Cycles for environmental and safety audits through automated Web Intelligence.

Decision Speed: 50% Faster Access to field data for executives via Mobile BI integration.

IT Overhead: 30% Savings on infrastructure costs by optimizing server sizing and retiring legacy support contracts. Asset Performance: Improved Visibility into pipeline or infrastructure health through Lumira’s advanced visualization.

Solution

A Turnkey Modernization & Migration

Apolis provided a comprehensive end-to-end solution to stabilize, secure, and modernize the client’s analytics ecosystem.

Our Strategic Approach included:

Full-Stack Installation: Installed and configured the latest versions of SAP Business Objects, Lumira, Mobile BI, and Crystal Reports.
Infrastructure Optimization: Sized and tuned new servers to ensure the architecture could handle millions of records with high-performance responsiveness.
Smart Migration Model: Instead of a “blind” migration, we used a service delivery model to audit the environment. This allowed us to:
- Identify and remove unused reports, objects, and universes.
- Convert legacy UNV universes to the modern UNX format.
- Identify and eliminate duplicate reports to streamline the repository.
Manual Remediation: Our team redeveloped complex reports that lost functionality during the automated conversion process, ensuring 100% feature parity in the new environment.
Enterprise Security: Implemented Windows AD-based SSO across the entire SAP landscape (BW & BI), simplifying the user experience.

Results

Delivering Impact, Driving Excellence

The engagement resulted in a standardized, modern analytics platform that prioritized business continuity while delivering next-generation capabilities.

Executive Agility: Leadership gained “anywhere-access” to data via Mobile BI, allowing for real-time decision-making in the field or the boardroom.
Architectural Stability: The tuned server environment provided a robust digital core capable of scaling with the company’s data growth.
Reduced Technical Debt: By cleaning unused content and deduplicating reports, the client moved forward with a leaner, more maintainable BI environment.
Standardized Security: SSO deployment significantly reduced login friction and improved the overall security posture for 7,000+ users.