A Successful Financial Reporting Transition To SAP BI For A Consumer Goods Company

Company Background

A subsidiary of a home and hardware-focused company, the client specializes in faucets and fixtures for the bathroom and kitchen, offering both wholesale and commercial products.

Inforte was able to assist in a phase of their business intelligence development that involved the transition of their reporting solution from a legacy system to SAP BI, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal issues.

Business Issue

The goal of the client was to transition all their financial reporting from a legacy system to SAP BI without interfering with month-end close procedures. In addition, during this process, there was an opportunity to improve their current reporting landscape.

When Inforte became engaged the reporting landscape was midtransition, disorganized and redundant. There were hundreds of usercreated queries in one InfoProvider with no structure. Query and workbook development was on-demand by both developers and end-users. Users had minimal training and little visibility into where their data was located, causing a lot of time to be wasted.

Inforte's Solution

The company engaged Inforte to fill a gap in the transition process between the developers and the end-users. Inforte set to address the two main pain points:

• The unconverted reports that needed to be transitioned before monthend close saw the retirement of the old reporting system
• The lack of communication between users and developers

In order to convert over one hundred reports, Inforte provided the client with several lines of support. They converted business, reorganized the query and workbook structures, and reformatted workbooks. They also provided group training and one-on-one sessions to end-users on BEx Query Designer and BEx Analyzer so that users could learn to convert their own reports. In addition, Inforte gathered information on the reporting landscape and provided users documentation on how to mine their data.

To alleviate the communication gap that was causing user confusion and development inefficiency, Inforte set out to make the reporting environment more transparent and more organized. They developed and began implementing numerous methods to minimize reporting complexity in order to decrease maintenance issues for developers and to increase report accuracy.

Practices recommended and/or implemented include:

• Implementing a naming convention
• Creating the role of a super user to fill the gap between end-users and developers
• Holding additional training sessions on both BEx tools and the data model
• Providing documentation of the data in the system and the most efficient way to access the data
• Establishing a reporting organization structure that is more aligned with the end-user reporting process

Business Benefits Delivered

The solution provided by Inforte set to establish a more efficient reporting environment with more informed users and less work-load on developers.

• The client had a successful month-end close with almost no BI reportrelated issues.
• Converted and reorganized queries and workbooks make reporting more efficient, allowing users to spend less time looking for reports and more time and power analyzing reports.
• The solution reduced the creation of orphan queries that are built and run once and left undeleted to clutter the system.
• Users now understand what they're querying and how best to do so, whereas before they had no visibility into the data and no idea how to best access it.
• The client was provided with a roadmap for future best practices to implement to ensure successful reporting going forward.

Words of Advice

One often-forgotten aspect of moving from a legacy system to an SAP BI reporting system is change management for end-users. By the time the issue is identified, the adverse effects are usually already all too apparent: an explosion of unused queries, difficulty finding anything in the system, users who have to go to developers for small questions, and queries that don't really report what their owners expect. Prevention is ideal, however implementing order and structure later in the conversion process is both possible and preferred.