SAP Business Objects - Intelligence for All
A Kalinax case study
Our rich experience with SAP Business Objects (BO) means our experts dominate this software, profoundly knowing its capabilities and limitations. We have successfully pushed the boundaries of what BO can do - adding tremendous value to the business of our clients, and saving them countless man hours.
Here we examine the case of a property management company. Their business is to handle all lease-related responsibilities on behalf of their clients (tenants). Reliable and consistent information is a prerequisite for a successful property management firm. The company followed established practices and rules. However, these varied from one office to another, and from one employee to another. In result, the database was always full of inconsistencies and errors, no matter what strategies local management adopted to solve this issue.
We won a bid to revamp the data and reporting processes of the firm.
Our first job was to map the number of offices, employees and their organizational hierarchy. Following talks with senior management, we interviewed employees from most offices in order to understand the day-to-day challenges which employees were facing with the system; going with them step-by-step, making sure no details fell out of the scope of our project.
Having talked to all stakeholders, we mapped the reporting needs across the company, and designed reports and dashboards which find the optimal level of detail for the reports to allow correct decision making with reasonable and well-defined data entry criteria.
We do not apply a "hit and run" strategy when we develop our reports.
We ensure that those who benefit from our work have all the tools necessary to manage our products, and a maximum amount of exceptions have been covered during training. We don't like surprises, and we protect our clients from surprises too.
We built comprehensive business intelligence logic and incorporated it within the firm's reports to prevent the cost of incorrect decision-making. We also standardized a number of best practices across our client's operations, while allowing localisation where a universal approach wouldn't make sense.
Then, after all the intelligence was coded, we used SAP Business Objects' not widely known combination of tools to visualise the reports in a way that employees and management could focus on what matters. We tested a few designs to ensure these reports bring an optimal benefit to the client.
Here we examine the case of a property management company. Their business is to handle all lease-related responsibilities on behalf of their clients (tenants). Reliable and consistent information is a prerequisite for a successful property management firm. The company followed established practices and rules. However, these varied from one office to another, and from one employee to another. In result, the database was always full of inconsistencies and errors, no matter what strategies local management adopted to solve this issue.
We won a bid to revamp the data and reporting processes of the firm.
Our first job was to map the number of offices, employees and their organizational hierarchy. Following talks with senior management, we interviewed employees from most offices in order to understand the day-to-day challenges which employees were facing with the system; going with them step-by-step, making sure no details fell out of the scope of our project.
Having talked to all stakeholders, we mapped the reporting needs across the company, and designed reports and dashboards which find the optimal level of detail for the reports to allow correct decision making with reasonable and well-defined data entry criteria.
We do not apply a "hit and run" strategy when we develop our reports.
We ensure that those who benefit from our work have all the tools necessary to manage our products, and a maximum amount of exceptions have been covered during training. We don't like surprises, and we protect our clients from surprises too.
We built comprehensive business intelligence logic and incorporated it within the firm's reports to prevent the cost of incorrect decision-making. We also standardized a number of best practices across our client's operations, while allowing localisation where a universal approach wouldn't make sense.
Then, after all the intelligence was coded, we used SAP Business Objects' not widely known combination of tools to visualise the reports in a way that employees and management could focus on what matters. We tested a few designs to ensure these reports bring an optimal benefit to the client.
Finally, we relieved the middle management from most of its reporting-related responsibilities, sending the reports directly to the employee who works with the system. Each day, every property management consultant was set to receive a personalised message with an attached report, running all best-practice logic, suggesting what the appropriate actions for the day were. Many employees embraced this approach, as this put an end to all Excel sheets being send around in their office.
All employees who we initially interviewed and were the main beneficent of the improved process, spending up to 70% less on admin, became the ambassadors of our work, and experts in suggesting improvements.
For senior management, we delivered a high data-integrity tool which allows data-driven decision making, happier middle management which does not spend hours chasing employees with Excel worksheets, and independent, proactive employees, spending less time on admin.
For us - this was a job well done.
Automated Exports
One of the underestimated powers of SAP Business Objects, and business intelligence reports in general, is the export automation. You can customise and pre-schedule reports to all your employees, making sure everyone has the information they need at hand. And, think about it - who doesn't like to see their name?
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Colour Coding
People love colours, and it is unreasonable to assume that just because we are building reports, colour does not matter. A red line could be the difference between someone taking an action or not; it could be what influences an important decision for the organisation.
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Full integration
Despite BO offering a handful of predefined functionalities, to unleash its full potential, we script an average of 150 formulas per report. These are inter-connected with the colour coding, sorting and calculations of your data - making sure your employees get an exceptional data experience.
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