Year: 2013

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We Can Help You

Successful Business Intelligence for midsize companies

We Can Help You:

You can engage BI System Builders to design and build your data warehouse and business intelligence solution. We provide all the business intelligence services listed below.

Migration To Google Cloud Platform

Get in touch to find out what services we offer relating to the Google Cloud Platform.

Cornerstone Solution®

Cornerstone Solution® is our backbone product combining our BI knowledge, know how and methods in a formalised and systematized way. It is a strategic business intelligence solution architecture and delivery framework. It consists of the Cornerstone framework of BI solution architecture and a full practical delivery model (a set of business intelligence services and mechanisms). Comprehensive BI solution architecture and a full set of business intelligence services and mechanisms form a full business intelligence solution known as an end to end BI solution. Cornerstone Solution® is our end to end BI solution that includes full end to end solution architecture.  Cornerstone Solution® is BI vendor and data agnostic so regardless of what has been or will be procured it is worth speaking to us about our methods.

System Integration

System Integration refers to the installation and configuration of your business intelligence platform and its integration into your data warehouse, your business process areas, departments, functions.  The data integration component may include legacy source systems, ODS’s, 3NF Enterprise Data Warehouse, master/reference data, spreadsheets, XML files, third party data, text files and RDBMS platforms such as Oracle or MS SQLServer, Informix or DB2.  System integration works equally well with ‘big data’ tool sets as with the long established classic BI tools.

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Optimal Data Warehousing Design & Build

Optimal data warehouse design is critical to a successful BI implementation.  Data warehouse design should be driven by user requirements. BI System Builders use the Agile Data Warehouse Design methods as published by Lawrence Corr, in collaborative workshops to gather requirements and model data. A Data warehouse that does not meet end user requirements is not fit for purpose. A Data warehouse must have excellent performance, hold trusted data, be loaded in a timely manner and join up the business.

ETL Design For Clean & Trusted Data

Clean and trusted data is achieved through the development of the ETL system which will extract, transform and load data into the data warehouse. This involves extracting data from source systems, cleaning it and transforming it before loading. Cleaning and transforming data encompasses numerous tasks such as fixing ‘dirty’ data by removing duplicates, fixing partial records according to business rules, trapping errors and conforming data etc. The benefit of this is that business users have confidence that they are working with data that can be trusted and that is joined up. There are really two big components to the ETL system. These are the development of the system and the management of the system.

Data Analytic Applications

Analytics consuming clean, quality assured, joined up data are highly valuable to the business. The three most common ways to achieve data analytics are to build, buy, or buy and extend. Data analytics may be designed and developed for you from scratch (build), procured from a vendor such as SAP BusinessObjects (buy), or by using and customising templates (build and extend), often referred to as accelerators to jump start a BI initiative.

Business Intelligence Services

   

Business Intelligence Competency Centres

Organisations can protect and grow their business intelligence investment by establishing a centre of excellence (CoE) often referred to as a business intelligence competency centre (BICC). BI System Builders have advised several companies on BICC strategy and process. The BICC is the optimum way to role out, maintain, support and scale your business intelligence initiative.

Business Intelligence Training

BI System Builders can provide bespoke business intelligence training geared to meet specific needs. This may include end user BI tool training, BI administration, BI system user adoption, data warehousing, dimensional modeling, and business intelligence competency centre awareness, orientation, and governance.

Business Intelligence Services

The following business intelligence services are provided by BI System Builders.

Macro-Business Intelligence Services

Business Intelligence Strategy

BI Solution Architecture Design

End to End BI Programme & Project Planning & Management

Business Intelligence End To End Solution Design

Business Intelligence Competency Centre – Design, Process, Implementation, & Governance

Business Intelligence Change Management & End User Adoption

SAP BusinessObjects

Our services include the Installation and configuration of the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform in Single or Multi-machine Deployments

Deployment Across Single or Multiple Environments – Production, Pre-Production, System Test, & Development

High Availability & Clustered Environments

SAP BusinessObjects Administration

SAP BusinessObjects Security Model Design & Implementation

Analytics & Report Development Services

SAP BusinessObjects Semantic Layer (Universe) Design (OLAP & Relational)

SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence Report Development

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Development

SAP Crystal Reports Development

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard Development

SAP BusinessObjects Live Office Development

SAP BusinessObjects Advanced Analysis (OLAP) Development

Ask us about developing with other BI tool sets

 Data Warehousing

Requirements Gathering Workshops (ADWD/ BEAM)

Dimensional Modeling

Logical & Physical Models

Conformed Dimension Bus

Enterterprise Data Warehouse Design

Physical Deployment

Data Federation

ETL System

ETL Strategy

Data Services (Data Integrator) & SSIS ETL Package Design & Development

Metadata Management

Master Data Management

Source to Target Field Mapping & Data Dictionaries

Data Profiling

Data Cleansing & Data Quality

Data Governance

 

Performance Design

Business Intelligence Platform, RDBMS, & ETL Sizing

Hardware Recommendations

Database Table Design Optimisation e.g. Aggregate Design & Monster Dimension Management

ETL System Optimisation

OLAP Cube & Query Design Optimisation

Optimization of All Reporting Tools Listed Under Report Development Services

Enterprise Performance Management

KPI’s, Balance Scorecards & Strategy Maps

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SAP Name Changes for SAP BusinessObjects – Archive

SAP have made several name changes to the existing suite of SAP BusinessObjects software.  The name changes are listed in the table below.

 

Original Name New Name
SAP® BusinessObjects™ Enterprise SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence platform
SAP® BusinessObjects™Xcelsius Enterprise SAP® BusinessObjects™Dashboards
Xcelsius Enterprise Interactive Viewing SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards Interactive Viewing
SAP® BusinessObjects™Advanced Analysis, Web Edition SAP® BusinessObjects™Analysis, edition for OLAP
SAP® BusinessObjects™Advanced Analysis, Office Edition SAP® BusinessObjects™Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office
SAP® BusinessObjects™Web Intelligence SAP® BusinessObjects™Web Intelligence (Installer name and documentation refers to “Interactive Analysis”)
Crystal Reports SAP® Crystal Reports
InfoView BI launch pad
BI Widgets Widgets
Universe Designer Universe design tool
Xcelsius Engage SAP Crystal Dashboard Design Personal Edition

 

 

Bisystembuilders.com have adopted all the new name changes for new articles. The earlier names for BusinessObjects Enterprise i.e. XI, XI R2, XI 3.0, and XI 3.1 and other tools will only be used in bisystembuilder.com articles that cite details of a specific earlier release.  An example of this would be a discussion regarding the difference between XI R2 and BI 4.x architecture.  Please refer to SAP for clarification as required.

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Business Intelligence Competency Centres

Business Intelligence strategy is key to success.

Want to implement a BICC? Here’s an introduction.

Your Business Intelligence investment takes time, money and effort to realise and so should be properly looked after. Your Business Intelligence implementation should be designed to meet the strategic objectives of your BI strategy and these objectives should fulfil your vision. Your strategy will be realised through your tactics and BI operational model. A key component that will help you fulfil your vision is the Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC).

Business Intelligence strategy is key to success.Your BICC will act as your BI Centre of Excellence; it will help to ensure benchmark standards and formalised and documented BI process and the governance around it. As the BICC matures it becomes the stable BI mechanism for BI services and development and through which you can pilot and roll out new BI tools to the user community. It will also help you avoid the BI pitfalls such as BI silos.

To establish your BICC you will need to make decisions in several key areas. Here are some examples:

  • Who will be the overall sponsor?
  • What services will your BICC offer?
  • What are your BI processes? For example, what is the process that a key user should follow in order to realise self-service BI?
  • What governance surrounds your BICC process? For example, what should and should not key users do whilst practising Self-service BI?
  • What is the development process within the BICC?
  • How will your off-shore development model work?
  • How will your BICC organisational structure work and who and how will you recruit?
  • What is your communication strategy around the BICC?
  • How will your funding model look?
  • How will your training model look?

Your BICC should be scalable and will grow with you as your organisation grows. Your BICC should also be specifically designed to meet the needs of your organisation, and to this end it can be tailor made. That said there are often common themes and activities that occur within the BICC.

Here are some example activities that your BICC might manage and conduct:

  • New BI projects
  • Change requests
  • Encyclopaedia maintenance
  • Standard report library management
  • Universe maintenance
  • Business analysis
  • Dimensional modelling
  • ETL strategy and development
  • Report writing
  • Data extracts
  • Data mining and predictive algorithms
  • Lifecycle management

As the organisation grows, the BI system develops and more and more users want a piece of the action. This can place a great burden on the IT department. Therefore, one of your key strategic BI objectives should be to help your user community realise Self-service BI. This means that they will be competent to log on to the BI system and help themselves to pertinent data for their analysis and then share the information with other users. The benefits of realising self-service BI are numerous but without process and governance it can become chaotic. The BICC should be the genesis of BI process.

With a clear BI process and communication everyone should understand what is going on. When the process is well managed, order will be maintained and lead to success. The process should be monitored so that if it starts to deviate it can be corrected (refer to Six Sigma process management for more information). If the process continues to deviate unchecked it will become a process out of control. This can lead to inefficiency, unnecessary stress and fire fighting.

If you’re a small to medium sized company establish your BICC footprint as early as possible and plan for it to grow with you. If you’re a medium sized to large company you may already have many BI users in your community. Mistakes in BI process and governance can be painful because BI has high visibility and happens directly in front of and is felt by end users. If you’re experiencing end user grumblings, IT backlogs or high and increasing Total Cost of Ownership revisit your BICC management strategy.