Limitless BI: Maximizing Your BO Investment

Back to Tracks and Agenda

Mark Richardson, Rose-Richardson Enterprises, Inc and Keith McDonald – City of Toronto

At the 2013 G8 summit, global leaders released an â€oeOpen Data Charter†with the vision of making Government data more accessible to the public. Learn how & why Governments can use SAP Analytics & Data Services tools to engage their citizens and help make their communities a better place by influencing government decision making with realworld data.

Presentation Slides: Deck 1 and Deck 2

Daylon Hunt, Mutual of Omaha

In 2011, Mutual of Omaha Bank faced many challenges, such as multiple business lines acquiring report information from various different data sources resulting in different versions of information.  As you can imagine, this created a situation where the bank’s senior management would view different reports that were all reporting on similar information but resulted in completely different answers!

In 2012, the Mutual of Omaha Bank team created a “Data Governance” department for managing reporting needs and requests.  This in turn would create a “one truth” type outlook on reporting but brought also provided  a fair share of obstacles to overcome, such as an even higher demand for reporting because of business growth. We adopted Business Objects for a reporting platform, InfoBurst to deliver reports and manage Dashboard data via the XDC, and  internal banking Dashboards for a professional KPI driven reporting system that is currently delivered and consumed on a regular basis by senior banking management.

Plans for 2015 are to look at opening up our Mobile offering and associated development opportunities.

David Behr, United Surgical Partners International

Traditionally, to get Business Intelligence up and running within an organization was a very costly and timely endeavor involving building out a Data Warehouse and purchasing a BI Software suite to deliver the data. While this still may be the case today, there are ways to build out valuable Business Intelligence applications at a fraction of the traditional cost and time.  I will demonstrate how United Surgical Partners International built out Business Intelligence capabilities along with a Data Warehouse from scratch, and delivered reporting, dashboards and self-service analytics corporate-wide in under 6 months, at a quarter of the expected cost. By bundling Business Objects with InfoBurst, USPI has been able to fast-track Business Intelligence and have attained an instant ROI.  I will do an “Update” as to where we are now, a year and a half into our BI project, high lighting big accomplishments and lessons learned.

Rajesh Ponnurangam, InfoSol Inc.

SAP is the leader in enterprise resource planning market and the new BI 4.1 brings the best integration between SAP ERP and BusinessObjects, making it easier for every SAP customer to incorporate BusinessObjects as a part of their BI Infrastructure.

This presentation will elaborate on how the new BI 4.1 proves to be a one-stop shop for enterprise BI and will benefit the customers evaluating the integration of BusinessObjects BI with Netweaver BW, ECC and BPC. Attendees will gain knowledge on prerequisites for connectivity options, user management, ABAP Queries, query design in SAP Business Explorer (Bex) etc. and also about how the different elements of BW and ECC systems can be leveraged in the new BusinessObjects BI environment. Case study on BI implementation for an SAP ERP customer will be discussed and step-by-step guide for creating the first report and dashboard on top of SAP data will be demonstrated.

John Whight, Palo Alto Medical Foundation

In order to measure the improvement in Patient Satisfaction the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) has created a comprehensive dashboard across specialties and survey types. A dashboard provides feedback to the business and becomes a focal point to visualize the impact of how various improvement efforts come together. Making data transparent and presenting it in an understandable format helps draw attention to areas for improvement and prioritizes them to leverage physician competitiveness and passion to improve care. Last year PAMF increased its patient satisfaction national ranking 14 percentile points on the national Press Ganey survey.

Ryan Goodman, Centigon Solutions Inc.

This session will take an in-depth look at top business cases and tips for injecting maps into your BI implementation. This informative session will extract and share the knowledge taken from hundreds of customer stories and share how you can gather and transform requirements into amazing location intelligence solutions that can help save you time, and money.

Rajesh Ponnurangam, InfoSol Inc.

Hear how one of the biggest aluminum manufacturers in the Gulf implemented BI 4.1 for reporting. This case study covers migration of BusinessObjects 3.1 to BI 4.1 and the integration of SAP and non-SAP systems with BI 4.1. Various techniques utilized in connecting ECC data structures and BW data models to the BI semantic layer will be discussed.

Ethan Durda, Ascension Business Intelligence

This session will be a quick walk through of some of the specific techniques that do and don’t work in BI.  Specific topics will cover the major phases of a project including Initiation, Definition, Execution, Control and Close and how these can be best managed for BI projects.  A general Agile methodology and techniques used at multiple clients will be explained.

Lori Wagner, Dana Holding Corporation

Dana’s philosophy is to empower their plant with local ownership and accountability. Each plant is responsible for its financial and operational performance reporting up to the regional and global business unit leaders.  The regional and global leadership received many reports and KPI’s from each functional business areas (safety, quality, finance, lean) but struggled to pull together a single view of a plants performance.   Based on the need to use these metrics to open discussions with the plants the leadership requested IT to provide a balanced scorecard “spreadsheet” that with good eyesight and time spent to review would tell the story.  Using Xcelcius Dashboards, XDC, and Infoburst we are able to surpass this request with rich visualizations that highlight problems areas and graphical show the trends.   Additionally, we provided for global collaboration creating a way to capture and communicate via the dashboard relevant information allow all to save discussion time to focus on the real issues.

Evan Davies, Safeway Inc.

How can you use the migration process to bring improved business visibility into the enterprise reporting platform and help drive a broader business intelligence strategy?  This seminar topic will review how the Safeway Enterprise Business Intelligence team put together a migration plan and implementation strategy that brought stability and productivity to the enterprise reporting platform and details the challenges faced and how they were resolved.

The seminar will last one hour and will focus on the migration from the 15 year old Crystal platform to the new Crystal Reports Server 2013 System.  Essentially this will cover:

• The analysis of the existing Crystal Enterprise 9 platform and the dependent infrastructure
• The processes involved in conducting a detailed report analysis to determine migration priorities
• The redefinition of the Crystal Platform to more closely match the Safeway business organization
• Key migration decision points and how they were addressed

What next?  How the Crystal deployment fits within the EBI strategy and an overview of future development plans.

Derek Duff, BIOTRONIK

A case study of an organization the makes cardiovascular medical devices which adopted BusinessObjects business intelligence & reporting tools 3 years ago and the leaps the organization has taken based as a result of the decision. A historical as-is/to-be roadmap will be presented to describe the significant progress made within this time.

Additionally a current as-is/to-be roadmap will be presented to show where we expect to shift and explore within the next 2 years.

Ethan Durda, Ascension Business Intelligence

BI is generally designed and focused on tactical and operational contexts.  The reasons for this paradigm are oft debated and while there is no agreement on the reason for this issue, it needs to be understood and addressed before changes can be made, and the BI department can be considered a partner in the strategic decision making process.

Rajesh Ponnurangam, InfoSol Inc.

In the ever-expanding mobile world, it is important to consider the most convenient way to view BI content on a mobile device. What are the steps required to build a mobile dashboard? Which is the best tool for a quick turnaround in mobile deployment? How does the new Design Studio help in creating native HTML5 dashboards for iOS devices without any hassle? How does WebIntelligence and Lumira help in providing quicker and better visualization in the mobile space?

This session will address all of the above questions in detail. The configuration setup for Mobile server including a live demo to deploy mobile content using Xcelsius, design studio, webI and Lumira will be demonstrated. The attendees can compare and contrast the different deployment options between the tools.

Adam Lange, A. Lange Consulting LLC.

As business intelligence professionals, we must work to maintain the trust of our stakeholders by thinking critically about all information we store and analyze. This session will explore a code of ethics for business intelligence – one that supports security, proper data usage, transparency, and other critical policies. Concerns will be raised about a current lack of transparency, and what organizations might do to build more openness with respect to what information is collected, how it is used, and with whom it is shared. This session will also explore possible systems through which organizations can incorporate the voices of their users, customers, and communities in order to further build transparency and to provide a check on data policy-making.

This session will offer no easy answers. Instead, the goal is simply to contribute towards a larger and ongoing discussion.

Ethan Durda, Ascension Business Intelligence

This course is an in-depth discussion of various BI projects that have and have not delivered on their potential and how to differentiate them before they are completed.  This will primarily focus on various projects that the presenter has been a part of and how they could have been optimized to increase their value to the organization.

Ethan Durda, Ascension Business Intelligence

This session will describe the various methods of using Agile for daily management of a BI team.  Care will be given to walk through and deal with the daily disturbances that BI teams are faced with.  Some best and worst case examples will be shared from the presenter’s experience and practice.

Rajesh Ponnurangam, InfoSol Inc.

A fascinating look at this often overlooked tool in the BusinessObjects suite that provides powerful analysis functions against multi-dimensional OLAP data sources like SAP BW and MS OLAP. We will share the best practices, useful tips, deployment options and some very powerful features. The product’s integration with Design studio and mobile devices will be discussed.

Ethan Durda, Ascension Business Intelligence

While people toss the letters KPI around without a care, they actually do mean something and defining and using KPI’s requires more than a few buzzwords and PowerPoints.  This will be a walkthrough of techniques and tools for defining and developing KPI’s for enterprise consumption and distribution.

Frank Zhang and Paul White, Onshore Partners

This case study will detail the BPC solution developed for Health Net and how the BPC data integrates with BO specifically xcelsius. We will show both actual and forecast data side by side as well as the what-if capabilities that were developed. We will detail our observations of the solution as well as pros and cons. We will discuss the use case for using WEBi for reporting of BPC data vs. using the excel EPM add-in.