Challenge:
One of California’s largest oil and gas producers faced challenges with its existing Business Objects implementation as SAP ended Mainstream Maintenance and Priority One Support of installed version. Desktop Intelligence, a tool no longer supported in the newer release was used extensively for report development in the past. Major task post upgrade was the need of converting thousands of Desktop Intelligence reports to Web Intelligence. With highly complex architecture that handled millions of records of data from disparate sources, complicated authentication including single sign-on requirements and limited in-house resources, customer needed a turnkey solution to provide their executives with quick and easy access to their data in new environment. Further they wanted new analytics solution to be mobile compatible.
Approach:
As part of this engagement, Apolis installed and configured SAP Business Objects, Lumira, Mobile BI and Crystal Reports. For effective performance new servers were sized, tuned and optimized. We then implemented SSO with user authentication configured in Windows AD, and rolled out SSO to SAP BW & BI platforms.
We leveraged our innovative service delivery model to gain insight into what content is unused (universe, objects, reports etc.), compare several environments and versions through the migration, analyze and clean UNV universes before converting to UNX, optimize report structures before converting them by determining which objects and variables aren’t used, track duplicate reports to pinpoint documents that have been copied to different folders across the environment and compare security between versions to determine what changed during the migration. Apolis had to heavily fix / redevelop certain reports which lost major functionality as a part of conversion or which could not be converted from Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence. During the governance and delivery phase, we oversaw coordination between various program stakeholders including business analysts, solution architects, infrastructure and OS support teams.
Results:
Apolis robust consulting capabilities enabled standardization and modernization of the client’s analytics solution while ensuring business continuity.
