Strategy & Execution
What Makes a Great Business Intelligence Client?
A few weeks ago, I wrote about what it takes to be a great business intelligence consultant. Now it’s time to turn the tables a bit, and talk about what it takes to be a great client. Successful implementation of a BI project is based on a partnership between the consultants and the client, so [...]
Continue reading...What Makes a Great SAP BusinessObjects Consultant?
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
In a previous post (If Google is Your Consultant’s Best Friend…RUN!) I mentioned a case where a “consultant” was hired for a project they obviously had no clue about how to deliver. Certainly a case of the project team bringing in the wrong resource. Along those lines, I’m often asked by people just starting their [...]
Continue reading...Top 5 Misconceptions About Business Objects Universes
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
I recently published the post 5 Reasons Why You Should Use an SAP BusinessObjects Universe to highlight some of the core benefits you’ll see when implementing the semantic layer for you organization. The post was derived from speaking with organizations new to the Business Objects world about the benefits of leveraging the semantic layer. Throughout [...]
Continue reading...5 Reasons Why You Should Use SAP BusinessObjects Universes
Monday, September 27, 2010
In meeting with organizations who are new to SAP BusinessObjects or who are legacy Crystal Reports users, we are often asked the question “Why should I use a Business Objects Universe?”. To organizations who have worked with universes for a period of time, the advantages and value proposition are clear. But for organizations who are [...]
Continue reading...Maintain Peak Performance With a Comprehensive SAP BusinessObjects Health Check
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
We’re about to embark upon a new project to conduct a large-scale health check on one of our client’s primary reporting environments, so I thought it may be beneficial to write about the process we use. Hopefully it will give you some insight into how to conduct a health check, and the benefits your organization [...]
Continue reading...Connecting BusinessObjects to SAP
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Following SAP’s big acquisition of BusinessObjects, more and more companies running SAP are looking to BusinessObjects as an answer for their reporting needs. The BusinessObjects tools WebIntelligence and Xcelsius are well suited for this role. However, getting SAP data into those tools is not yet as easy as SAP would like. For a variety of reasons, BusinessObjects Data Services is the tool of choice for extracting data from SAP. In this post I will explain how Data Services talks to SAP to extract data.
Continue reading...Underwhelm Your Users with a Well-designed Dashboard
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Dashboard and visualizations are a hot topic right now. You can’t go to an SAP BusinessObjects event or a user group meeting without seeing over half of the presentations focusing on dashboards and visualizations. And, like with any cutting-edge technology, it seems everyone is trying to get in on the action. While that’s a good thing, sometimes people lack the basic knowledge and skills to utilize those tools to deliver effective analysis.
Continue reading...Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work (part 5): If I Give Them Ad Hoc Access to Data, They’ll Keep Asking For More
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Back in March I posted “Five Reasons Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work In Some Organizations“. In that post, I listed some of the major concerns that I hear from potential clients when the subject of ad hoc reporting is broached. We’ve already addressed “Our people aren’t smart enough to create their own reports”, “We [...]
Continue reading...Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work (part 4): I Pay People in IT to Create Reports
Thursday, July 15, 2010
One of the other reasons I hear is that managers don’t want to train end-users to create reports, since they have folks in IT that already tasked with that. Some report authoring will always need to be handled by IT, due to it’s complexity, lack of data availability, etc… But I argue that the lion’s share of the development can be handled within each department instead, freeing IT developers to take on other projects critical to the organization.
Continue reading...Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work (part 3): I don’t want people poking around in data they shouldn’t have access to
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Data security is typically a really a big deal for organizations, and it SHOULD be. Thankfully, SAP BusinessObjects offers a number of ways to provide security around functionality, content and data. With some careful planning and a well-designed SAP BusinessObjects implementation, you can rest assured knowing that users will have access to only the information that they are supposed to see.
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- Release of a new SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards/Xcelsius add-on component
- SAP BusinessObjects universe and report development for a financial services company
- Creation of a custom SAP BusinessObjects CBT program to provide training to end users
- Student and faculty performance analysis and benchmarking for a K-12 school district
- Development of a custom SAP BusinessObjects extranet, data warehouse, universes, reports and dashboards for a statewide Poison Center
- Claims analysis and reporting for a professional liability insurance company
- Migration from SAP BusinessObjects XIR3 to SAP BI4 for an insurance company
- Inventory and sell-through analysis for a consumers goods manufacturing company
- Sales data mart, reports and dashboards for a mid-market manufacturing company
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
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