A global leader in contact lens solutions has continued to grow its operations over the last 40+ years, helping improve the way people see in over 130 countries. Its scale has grown significantly with billions of contact lenses manufactured every year helping millions of individuals. Its 10000+ strong employee base continued to set industry standards using cutting edge research on optics and advanced materials. As a trusted and reliable partner for eyecare professionals and lens wearers around the world, they have a continuous need to innovate and bring a fresh perspective to vision care. The digital disruption across all walks of life and increasing screen time has created an inflection point in the nature and scale of vision care needs. The company leadership determined the need to prepare and upgrade its global workforce to respond to this rapid change. The organization’s leaders invested in Taleo as the platform for their workforce transformation program. It was implemented with SAP BO as the analytics and reporting foundation. When Oracle announced the end of support to SAP BO on the Taleo platform, the company leadership decided to transition to OBIEE to benefit from its cutting-edge features and tighter integration with Taleo. DataTerrain was chosen as the partner to lead the transition effort based on its established track record of seamlessly executing comparable or larger-scale projects with Zero business disruption.
DataTerrain’s proprietary accelerated automation-led transition approach
DataTerrain team(subject matter experts) deployed their best-practices-based transition methodology and adapted it to the unique needs of the customer. DataTerrain’s proprietary automation tool was also leveraged for this project which was executed in the following major phases –
1. AS-IS Analysis and Planning – DataTerrain kicked off this project with an initial analysis of the SAP BO reports repository using its automation tool. This analysis included information such as business purpose and key users, business SME and owner for each report, run times, frequency of usage, run schedules. It also identified unique BO features used in specific reports and complex queries/functions used. Besides, complex implementations for classes, joins(relationship definition) between classes and objects(measures and dimensions) were identified in the BO implementation for suitable handling during automated transition. Interventions were planned for potential transition issues identified as risks in specific reports. Standardization and improvement opportunities were identified and proactive issue fizzes were planned in discussion with users. The analysis report from the automated assessment was used to create a detailed activity plan with clearly identified dependencies if any on customer associates. Key stakeholders of the customer reviewed and signed off this plan. Calendars of customer associates were blocked in advance to ensure their availability.
2. Automated Transition and Validation – DataTerrain team configured the automation utility based on the agreed outcomes from the analysis phase. The BO Universe file and all elements in the source environment were transported to OBIEE RPD using DataTerrain’s automation tool. Individual elements and complex business logic across the reports layer of the BO Universe were translated during the automated transition process. Metadata was transformed from BO Universe to the appropriate layers in RPD – physical layer, business model layer, and presentation layer by using OBIEE best practices and following zero-defect principles. Potential performance bottlenecks were also fixed by the DataTerrain team during the automated transition. As a next step, the converted reports and source reports were compared using the automated utility. This automated process covered both report formats and layouts and data presentation to ensure exact translation from source to target systems. This enabled them to identify and fix issues early, saving significant effort for testing by customer associates in subsequent phases.
3. User Acceptance and Rollout – Key customer stakeholders validated the converted reports as a part of the acceptance process. There were no surprises or major issues identified during this phase since key users and stakeholders were involved throughout the preceding phases and participated in key decisions and interim milestone sign-offs. The accepted reports were subsequently promoted to production on time and while BO was still supported.
The DataTerrain Difference
The customer noted the following as outstanding aspects of DataTerrain’s project execution –
1. Best practices and standardization – DataTerrain’s team used the automation tool judiciously to apply OBIEE guidelines to ensure the converted reports adhered to best-practice standards. The tool was also customized based on customer requests to implement customer standards across reports. For example, a standardized structure to print parameter values in report headers was automatically applied by customizing DataTerrain’s utility.
2. Accumulated customer knowledge and decades of improvements carried forward – DataTerrain ensured that the overall look and feel of reports was carried forward from BO to OBIEE as required by users. This ensured that years of knowledge and effort to shape the form and substance of the reports were transitioned seamlessly. This also minimized user training efforts and accelerated adoption.
3. DataTerrain’s domain knowledge – DataTerrain team brought deep domain knowledge and an in-depth understanding of Taleo. This helped minimize customer effort and enabled them to proactively prevent potential transition issues.
4. Global Delivery Model – DataTerrain deployed associates from its global delivery centers so that project activities followed the sun to ensure progress round the clock. This enabled accelerated project execution and successful transition before BO went out of support.
DataTerrain helped the customer to successfully transition Taleo reporting from BO to OBIEE on time and within budget. The customer has benefited from the enhanced features provided by Oracle for this integrated stack while reducing the TCO on its global deployment.